"Vernacular" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... covers and includes. Reason, conscience, understanding, have no impersonality to him. When he uses the words, he uses them as synonymes of his determinations, or as decorative terms into which it pleases him to translate the rough vernacular of his wilfulness and caprices. The "Constitution," also, a word constantly profaned by his lips, is not so much, as he uses it, the Constitution of the United States as the moral and mental constitution of Andrew Johnson, which, in his view, is the one primary fact ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... the vernacular which he avoided when his small kin was near, waked Philip Danvers, and soon he was outside the walls of the 'dobe fort which Major Thornhill had courteously placed at the service of the Canadian officer ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... tongue as a Japanese uses it, one would need to be born again, and to have one's mind completely reconstructed, from the foundation upwards. It is possible that a person of European parentage, born in Japan, and accustomed from infancy to use the vernacular, might retain in after-life that instinctive knowledge which could alone enable him to adapt his mental relations to the relations of any Japanese environment. There is actually an Englishman named Black, born in Japan, whose proficiency [11] in the language is proved by the fact that he is ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... defiance of Rome, and the subjection and spoliation of the Church, were accompanied by a measure in which Cranmer was the moving spirit, and to which Henry gave full support—the open admission of the Scriptures in the vernacular—which made it no longer possible for the individual to disclaim responsibility on the score that the priesthood alone held the key to the mysteries of religion. This was in truth the keystone of the Reformation, ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... With the cap on my head and lamp lighted, I stood on the verge of a ten by twelve hole in the earth, that was almost eight hundred feet deep. We think that a well one hundred feet deep is quite a distance down into the ground, but here was a hole eight times deeper. In the mining vernacular this hole is termed a shaft—the term that will be employed in speaking of it hereafter. There are two of these shafts, about one hundred yards apart. Each shaft is divided by a wooden partition which descends from the top to the bottom. Two elevators, or cages, as they are called, ascend and ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... the ape-man, in the vernacular of the anthropoids. "I will not harm you. You are to be Tarzan's balu. Tarzan will protect you. He will feed you. The best in the jungle shall be for Tarzan's balu, for Tarzan is a mighty hunter. None need you fear, not even ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... an iron vessel, of various sizes, capable of holding from 28 lbs. to 3 cwt., heated by a steam jacket, or by a water-bath. The soap is put into the pan by degrees, or what is in the vernacular called "rounds," that is, the thin slabs are placed perpendicularly all round the side of the pan; a few ounces of water are at the same time introduced, the steam of which assists the melting. The pan being covered up, in about half an hour ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... same time the largest, of these are the "honeycomb corals," forming the genus Favosites (figs. 84, 85), which derive both their vernacular and their technical names from their great likeness to masses of petrified honeycomb. The most abundant species are Favosites Gothlandica and F. Hemispherica, both here figured, which form masses ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... nowhere better illustrated than in the favour they bestowed on efforts to extract amusement from the parities and disparities of form and meaning subsisting between the words 'will' and 'wish,' the latter being in vernacular use as a diminutive of the former. Twice in the 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' (I. iii. 63 and IV. ii. 96) Shakespeare almost strives to invest with the flavour of epigram the unpretending announcement that one interlocutor's 'wish' is in harmony ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... was a genuine Yankee, and thoroughly conversant with the Yankee vernacular which he used freely. In exhibiting the General, Barnum often said to visitors that Tom Thumb's parents, and the rest of the family, were persons of the ordinary size, and that the gentleman who presided in the ticket-office was the ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... or Abel Boyer, the industrious annalist, or the laborious but cantankerous Oldmixon, were keeping their heads above water by journalism, almost exclusively, of course, political. Defoe showed a genius for the art, and his mastery of vigorous vernacular was hardly rivalled until the time of Paine and Cobbett. At any rate, it was plain that a market was now arising for periodical literature which might give a scanty support to a class below the seat of patrons. It was at this point that the versatile, speculative, ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... magnificent future may be anticipated among the great speech-media of Asia and of the world. They manifest that capacity for the absorption and assimilation of foreign elements which we recognise as making English the greatest vernacular that the ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell
... his table. Then he wandered into the local editor's room. The newspaper boys all liked Hammerly, and many a good item they got from him. They never gave him away, and he saw that they never got left, as the vernacular is. ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... single inspiring aim of the author has here been to furnish enlightened readers, versed only in the English language, the means of acquiring, through the medium of their vernacular, some proportioned, trustworthy, and effective knowledge and appreciation, in its chief classics, of the great literature which has been written in French. This object has been sought, not through narrative and description, making books and authors the subject, but ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... as many different things of my childhood. I finally dismissed them with this phrase, as I dropped easily enough into the vernacular, "Shure, we'd invite ye all t' tay but there's only three cups in ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... agreement with the Syriac translation. (5) This Syriac translation (if it be a translation, which is very doubtful, for we know neither the time of its appearance, nor the translators and Syriac was the vernacular of the Apostles) renders the text before us in a way well explained by ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part III] • Benedict de Spinoza
... unusual passion for new words. Little Fay would stop short in the midst of the angriest yells if anyone called her conduct in question by some new term of opprobrium. Ayah's vocabulary was limited, even in the vernacular, and nothing would have induced her to return railing for railing to the children, however sorely they abused her. But Jan occasionally freed her mind, and at such times her speech was terse and incisive. Moreover, she quickly perceived her power over her niece in ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... which had been so prevalent on the passage to Bear Island. Mr. Cooke had never felt better, and looked every inch a sea-captain in his natty yachting-suit. He had acquired a tan on the island; and, as is eminently proper on a boat, he affected nautical manners and nautical ways. But his vernacular savored so hopelessly of the track and stall that he had been able to acquire no mastery over the art of marine invective. And he possessed not so much as one maritime oath. As soon as we had swung clear of the cove he made for the weather stays, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... a book of mixed prose and poetry on "Love and Virtue" (the Convito, or Banquet); a Latin treatise on Monarchy (de Monarchia), recommending the "divine right" of the Emperor; another in two parts, and in the same language, on the Vernacular Tongue (de Vulgari Eloquio); and learnt to know meanwhile, as he affectingly tells us, "how hard it was to climb other people's stairs, and how salt the taste of bread is that is not our own." It is even thought not improbable, from one awful passage of his ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... (1766-1844), Hungarian rabbi and pioneer of religious reform. He favoured the use of the organ and of prayers in the vernacular, and was instrumental in founding schools on modern lines. Chorin was thus regarded as a leader of the newer Judaism. He also interested himself in public affairs; and his son Francis was a ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... sickens me is that the dragon took that spy-glass. You see if I don't get it yet." (Mrs. Handsomebody was "the dragon" in our vernacular.) ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... Mr. Pope's ingenious translation of the Iliad. He now proposed to narrate the principal incidents of that poem—having thoroughly mastered the argument and fairly forgotten the words—in the current vernacular of Sandy Bar. And so for the rest of that night the Homeric demi-gods again walked the earth. Trojan bully and wily Greek wrestled in the winds, and the great pines in the canon seemed to bow to the wrath of the son of Peleus. Mr. Oakhurst listened with quiet satisfaction. Most especially was he ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... sir," we made answer, under his nose, having been scurrying forwards while he was speaking, the Irish mate adding in his native vernacular, "Begorrah, we'll rig up the whole, sir, in the twinkling of ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... (official, regular use limited to literate minority), Mende (principal vernacular in the south), Temne (principal vernacular in the north), Krio (the language of the re-settled ex-slave population of the Freetown area ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... not, noble Freiherr," (he spoke in the vernacular of their common canton,) "whether we have most reason to esteem or to disrelish these Augustines. While they do so many Christian acts to the travellers on their mountain yonder, they are devils incarnate in the way of upholding popery and its abominations among the people. Look you, ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... Far away in that bearing. This term, as down west, &c., is an Americanism, recently adopted into our vernacular. ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... later assumed a monosyllabic, isolating, uninflected form, grammatical relations being indicated by position. From the earliest forms of speech several subordinate vernacular languages arose in various districts, and from these sprang local dialects, etc. Tone-distinctions arose—i.e. the same words pronounced with a different intonation came to mean different things. Development of these distinctions led to carelessness of articulation, and multiplication ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... mountain. I asked him in Italian the distance to the hospice, and he undertook to answer me in French, but the words did not seem to flow very fluently, so I said quickly, observing then that he was an Englishman: 'Try some other language, if you please, sir!' He replied instantly in his vernacular: 'You have a d—d long walk before you, and you'll have to hurry to get to the top before night!' Thanking him, we shook hands and hurried on, he downward and I upward. About eight miles from the summit, I was directed into the wrong path by an ignorant boy who was tending sheep, and went a mile ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... straggling, their brown eyes are soft, their clothes are desperately European, but ill-fitting and tired. They chatter together ceaselessly and rapidly like starlings, with curious inflections in their English speech, and phrases snatched up from the vernacular. They are forever glancing and whispering, bursting at times into wild peals of laughter which lack the authentic ring of gladness. They are a people of shadows blown by the harsh winds of destiny across the face of a ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... the range and the omnipresent cowboy. Old-timers had told him stories of Abilene and Dodge, when they were in their heyday. He had gambled in the hells of Juarez, across the Texas border where there was no law. Some of the Montana cattle towns were far from slow, in cowboy vernacular. But here he sensed a new element. And soon he grasped it as the fever of the rush for gold. The excitement of it took hold of him, so that he had to reason with ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... bilious look; a third, Micaul More, or big Michael, from his uncommon size; and a fourth, Sheemus Ruah, or red James, from the color of his hair. These epithets, to be sure, still occur in Ireland, but far less frequently now than in the times of which we write, when Irish was almost the vernacular language of the country. It was for a reason similar to those just alleged, that John O'Rorke was known as Lamh Laudher O'Rorke; he, as well as his forefathers for two or three generations, having been remarkable for prodigious ...
— The Dead Boxer - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... especially important in that which marks a particular phase of controversy. Secondly, a student's duty to English society, and to the church of which he is a member—as also, I humbly venture to think, to his own soul—requires that he shall first listen thoughtfully to the vernacular theology of England. Let him learn the chief affirmative verities of the Christian faith before meddling with the negative side. Let him master the grand thoughts or solid erudition of Hooker and Pearson; of Bull, and Bingham, and Waterland; of Butler ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... authorities, but his theme is generally "Society" with a capital S. "Praed," says Locker in "My Confidences," "is the very best of his school: indeed, he has a unique position; for in his narrower vein of whimsical wit, vernacular banter, and antithetical rhetoric, which may correctly be called vers de societe in its most perfected form, and its exactest sense, he has never been equalled." These phrases hit off Praed very well—if ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time. And the most interesting parts of the Arthurian story are rarely handled at all in such early vernacular versions of it as we have, whether in verse or prose. Naturally enough, perhaps, it was the fabulous historic connection with British history, and the story of the great British enchanter Merlin, that attracted most attention. The Arthour and Merlin which is in the Auchinleck ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... was a "swell" in Strahan's vernacular, but even in the early part of their interview he gave the impression of being something more, or rather such a superior type of the "swell" genus, that Marian's friend was conscious of a fear that the young girl might be dazzled and interested, ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... the support of the military profession. While such was his empire over the hearts of his countrymen, he enjoyed among the natives a popularity, such as other governors have perhaps better merited, but such as no other governor has been able to attain. He spoke their vernacular dialects with facility and precision. He was intimately acquainted with their feelings and usages. On one or two occasions, for great ends, he deliberately acted in defiance of their opinion; but on such occasions he gained more in their respect than he lost in their love, In general, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... answers which the cap and bells are made responsible for here, were written down, but with other applications, in graver authorities. It is the philosophical discovery of the time, which the Fool is undertaking to translate into the vernacular, when he puts the question, 'Canst thou tell why one's nose stands in the middle of his face?' And we have all the Novum Organum in what he calls, in another place, 'the boorish,' when he answers it; and all the choicest gems of 'the part operative' of the new learning have been rattling from ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... the Hottentot country near the frontier of the European settlements in Cape Colony, acquired some elements of civilization, together with a strain of Boer and English blood, and in some cases even the Dutch vernacular. They were therefore differentiated from their nomadic and warlike kinsmen in the grasslands north of the Orange River, which formed the center of the Hottentot area.[220] A view of the ancient Germans during the first five or six centuries after Christ reveals differentiation ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... a year after Judge Hyde's death, Abner Dimock, the tavern-keeper's son, returned to Greenfield, after years of absence, a bold-faced, handsome man, well-dressed and "free-handed," as the Greenfield vernacular hath it. Nobody knew where Abner Dimock had spent the last fifteen years; neither did anybody know anything against him; yet he had no good reputation in Greenfield. Everybody looked wise and grave when ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... lined with zinc; and the zinc was suffering from tetter or other serious skin trouble and was peeling badly. There was a current superstition about the place to the effect that the bathroom and the water supply might on occasion be heated with a device known in the vernacular as a geezer. ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... borgh, which is the genuine Saxon spelling, a slight change, such as modern organs too often make upon ancient sounds, will produce first Bogh, and then, elisa H, or compromising and sinking the guttural, agreeable to the common vernacular practice, you have either Boff or Bog as it happens. The word Quickens requires in like manner to be altered,decomposed, as it were,and reduced to its original and genuine sound, ere we can discern its real meaning. By the ordinary exchange of the Qu into Wh, familiar to the ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... little chat with me. As the summer progressed I wondered more and more at this strange new acquaintance of mine; this rough looking tramp with the manners of a gentleman and the speech, except for a few lapses in the vernacular of the road, of a man of considerable education. The oddest thing of all was the feeling I had that somewhere, at some time, Jim and I had met before. Little tricks of voice and expression would seem ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... placing his comrade's life in jeopardy, then begging it against his will, and finally taking it with his own hand, is a yet more unhappy creation of wayward fancy; and it is only in the names of the conspirators, in the introduction of an Englishman, Eliot, (whom he has brought nearer vernacular spelling than he found him,—Haillot,[15]) and in the character of Rainault, that Otway is borne out by authority. The last-mentioned person is described by the French ambassador as a sot, a gambler, and a sharper, whose rogueries ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... down by an archangel. He was a changed man instantly. He was all enthusiasm, full of his subject, eager to go on. He proposed to pay Goodman a salary to stay there and keep him company and furnish him with inspiration—the Pacific coast atmosphere and vernacular, which he feared had slipped away from him. Goodman declined the salary, but extended his visit as long as his plans would permit, and the two had a happy time together, recalling old Comstock days. Every morning, for a month or more, they used to tramp over the farm. They fell into the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... knowledge of wood-craft is wonderful, had timed my movements so correctly that they had arrived just in time to meet me at this point. The two raftsmen rubbed the canoe all over with their hands, and expressed delight at its beautiful finish in their own peculiar vernacular. ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... Edward VI the Prayer-book and its vernacular services were introduced. The people had hardly got used to them before the accession of Queen Mary, and the consequent papal reaction, restored the Latin mass, around which most of the religious controversies of the time were furiously ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... in the vernacular, but the tone in which the young man spoke rang so confidently that it brought to Ford a pleasant thrill of satisfaction. From the first he had found in the personality of the young man something winning and likable; a shrewd manliness and tolerant good-humor. ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... perge, puer, as a body may say," interrupted the major, who seemed resolved to show what command of language he had, for he uniformly began his speeches in his vernacular, and translated them, though with an effort, into English, or any other tongue he chanced ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... intending to establish it, a family vernacular has grown up in the paper which our people understand, but which—like all other family vernaculars—is Greek to those outside the circle. Thus ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... sepulchral, but either the ghostly apparition that uttered the command had slipped up on its vernacular, or it was the spirit of a bandit. Some demand of the kind was, however, urgently necessary, for George did not, as formerly, show a desire to flee; his belligerent attitude suggested fight and he was a husky specimen with a handy club. Even though ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... safety, successfully planned the escape of Hugh's master and his whole party. The story is given on uninterrupted tradition in the country of the Mackenzies; and a full and independent version in the vernacular of the hero's humane conduct on Leathad Leacachan will be found in the Celtic Magazine, vol. ii., pp. 468-9, to which the ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... jurisdiction, that no place of Scripture justifies it. This is what was meant when the assertion that the Papacy is of divine right was denied. This becomes quite clear when Henry VIII instead of the previous prohibitions against distributing the Bible in the vernacular gave his licence for it. As he once declared with great animation, the advancement of God's word and of his own authority were one and the same thing.[125] The engraved title-page of the translation which appeared with his privilegium puts into ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... of wine. But the honest habitues of the hall, amongst the lower rank of students, who have a taste for good living, have many harmless arts by which they improve their banquet, and innocent 'dodges' (if we may be permitted to use an excellent phrase that has become vernacular since the appearance of the last dictionaries) by which they strive to attain for themselves more delicate food than the common every-day roast ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... shade of the lilac-coloured bungor trees. Therefore the youths and maidens in the palace were having a good time, and were gaily engaged in sowing the whirlwind, with a sublime disregard for the storm, which it would be theirs to reap, when the King returned to punish. As the vernacular proverb has it, the cat and the roast, the tinder and the spark, and a boy and a girl are ill to keep asunder; and consequently my friends about the palace were often in trouble, by reason of their love affairs, even when the ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... and his wife were two of the most sympathetic and admirable people of their race I have ever known, and the elder Tricoupi's history of his country in its later fortunes is recognized as the standard, both in its history and in its use of the modern Greek, purely vernacular, which we have. The son, head of the government or leader of the opposition from an age at which in few countries a man can lead in politics, was, rara avis in those lands, an absolutely devoted patriot and honest man; but his country ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... our moral lapses. Moral lapses are to be regretted, of course; but they do not vitiate our status as the Sons of God. It is possible that no one believes they do; but much of the loose statement current among those who lay emphasis on morals would give that impression. There is a whole vernacular in vogue in which souls are "lost" or "saved" according to the degree to which they conform or do not conform to other people's views as to what they ought to do. Much of our pietism is to the effect that God ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... compositions giving the history of these works by which they are prefaced and the latter work is closed. No more characteristic examples of Bunyan's muse can be found. They show his excellent command of his native tongue in racy vernacular, homely but never vulgar, and his power of expressing his meaning "with sharp defined outlines and without the ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... any literary conversation whatever. I mean the people who have heard the local pronunciation of celebrated names, and attempt not only to imitate it, but to impose on others their broken German or Arabic, or what not. They also learn the vernacular names of those who are generally spoken of in their Latin forms; at least, they learn a few cases, and hawk them as evidences of erudition. They are miserably mistaken: scholarship, as a rule, {323} always accepts the vernacular form of a name which has vernacular celebrity. Hallam ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... and a still greater advantage in the character of its population. And in addition to these we have the undoubted and constantly increasing supremacy of the English language. Just as during the Middle Ages Latin was the vernacular of the learned classes, and as to-day French is the language of diplomacy in Europe, so is English the common tongue in all the commercial localities of the globe. With English a man can commit himself to foreign travel anywhere, ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... kindly shut up," he said, blending his natural politeness with his employment of the vernacular, "and if you will also answer a few questions I will save you a lot of trouble. You were ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... continue in its ruins, and suffered the other to be got through anyhow, or not at all - just as it happened. Clergymen were engaged to perform the service (there was but one each day) at the lowest price of the clerical market. Occasionally it was announced, in the vernacular of the district, that there would be no church, "because the priest had gone for the sea-bathing," or because the waters were out, and the priest could ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... into vernacular verse of the prose versions of specimens of the literature of the great apes of Africa, collected by Professor GARNER. It is not too much to say that those touching cris de coeur redolent of the jungle, the lagoon and the hinterland, will ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... the life of every philosopher and dreamer when he feels himself the flimsiest of absurdities, when the Thing in Being has its way with him, its triumphant way, when it asks in a roar, unanswerably, with a fine solid use of the current vernacular, "What Good is ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... sound of that distinctly-cowboy vernacular, Macdonald sprang back to regain the shelter of his walls, sensing too late the trap that the cowboy's unguarded word had betrayed. Chance Dalton at one corner of the rude bungalow, his next best man at the other, had been waiting for the ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... anything that is picturesque about the man-killer of the mountain country. He is lacking sadly in the romantic aspect and the delightfully studied vernacular with which an inspired school of fiction has invested our Western gun-fighter. No alluring jingle of belted accouterment goes with him, no gift of deadly humor adorns his equally deadly gun-play. He does his killing in an unemotional, unattractive kind of way, with ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... probably with no passenger accommodations at all, but which pushes before her from Pittsburg to New Orleans more than a score of flatbottomed, square-nosed scows, aggregating perhaps more than an acre of surface, and heavy laden with coal. Such a tow—for "tow" it is in the river vernacular, although it is pushed—will transport more in one trip than would suffice to load six heavy freight trains. Not infrequently the barges or scows will number more than thirty, carrying more than 1000 tons each, or a cargo exceeding ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... one proceeds backwards from this point, the evidence becomes increasingly fragmentary and uncertain. The greatest source of doubt arises from the confusion between sundials, water-clocks, hand-struck time bells, and mechanical clocks, all of which are covered by the term horologium and its vernacular equivalents. ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... a sedate, rather commonplace realism. One of the most national of authors, he loses much in translation.[1] His style is racy, smacking of the street or the counting-house; he is one of the greatest masters of the Russian vernacular. To translate his Moscow slang into the equivalent dialect of New York would be merely to transfer Broadway associations to the Ilyinka. A translator can only strive to be colloquial and familiar, giving up the effort to render ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... kingdom in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. French was the language of the Anglo-Norman court of London, as Persian of the court of Delhi or Agra; the Frenchified King's English was the court form of the vernacular in England, as the Persianised Hindustani in North India. It was this lingua franca that Europeans in India set ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... fortune of the first Napoleon; just as the eagle—Prometheus and the eagle in one shape—was fast fettered by sheer force and strength to his rock in the Atlantic, there arose a man in Central Germany, on the old Thuringian soil, to whom it was given to assert the dignity of vernacular literature, to throw off the yoke of classical tyranny, and to claim for all the dialects of Teutonic speech a right of ancient inheritance and perfect freedom before unsuspected and unknown. It is almost needless to mention this honoured name. For the furtherance ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... inaccessible to nursery humbug of any kind. They are never whipped, and eat as much pastry as they think proper; whereby they grow up dyspeptic and rational beyond their years. Parents don't appear to exercise any particular functions, masters (we again beg Demus's pardon for the poverty of the vernacular) have nothing magisterial about them, and servants won't stomach even the name, at least if they wear white skins, and know it. After the first burst of admiration at the philosophy of the thing, it grows tiresome to live amongst people who are all so much ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... forward and cocked his revolver. One of the beach-combers shouted out something in angry vernacular, and Charlie instantly responded. All this time the line had been slowly advancing upon the enemy, and Wilbur began to wonder how long that heartbreaking suspense was to continue. This was not at all what he had imagined. Already he was within twenty ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... them. I rather like the race. Anyway, it makes an interesting mixture. We have had to put them all together, and they get on capitally, exchanging stories and gossip and sympathy like men of the same company. One of them, a Boer,—" she hesitated for the right word; then she adopted the vernacular of the service—"went out, the other day; and, among his mourners, the sincerest ones were the two London Tommies in the two next beds. War isn't all hatred, by any means. Turn nurse for a month and ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... travels in France and Italy, full of admiration for everything that was not German. They were delighted to hear that in France, in Holland, and in Italy, it was respectable to write poetry in the modern vernacular, and set to work in good earnest. After the model of the literary academies in Italy, academies were founded at the small courts of Germany. Men like Opitz would hardly have thought it dignified to write verses in their native tongue had it not been for the moral support which they received from ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... nothing new to us; we have all been threatened in this form. Why, the very last time I fought the trades, my wife was threatened I should be brought home on a shutter, with my intestines sweeping the ground. That was the purport, only it was put vernacular and stronger. And they reminded me that the old gal's clothes (that is Mrs. Cheetham: she is only twenty-six, and the prettiest lass in Coventry, and has a row of ivories that would do your heart ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... vulgarisms, or to what is worse. On this point, listen to the recent declarations of two leading men in the Senate of the United States, both of whom understand the use of the English language in its power: 'In truth, I must say that, in my opinion, the vernacular tongue of the country has become greatly vitiated, depraved, and corrupted by the style of our Congressional debates.' And the other, in courteous response remarked, 'There is such a thing as ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... they were compelled to take a long chance. A Mounted Policeman can't use his gun except in self-defense. He isn't supposed to smoke up a fugitive unless the fugitive begins to throw lead his way—which method of procedure gives a man who is, in the vernacular, "on the dodge" all the best of a situation like that; for it gives an outlaw a chance to take the initiative, and the first shot often settles an argument of that kind. The dominating idea, as I understood it, was that the majesty of the law should prove a sufficiently powerful ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... contemporaries of Abolitionists turn over the pages of antique denunciation, and their lymph really quickens in their veins as they read the prophetic vehemence of an Isaiah, the personality of a Nathan, the unmeasured vernacular of Luther, the satire and invective of all good upbraiders of past generations, until they reach their own, which yet waits for a future generation to make scripture and history of its speech and deeds. Time is the genial critic that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... unknown symbol. If correct, then we should read "24 piccoli each" for this was about the equivalent of a grosso. This is the first time Polo mentions cowries, which he calls porcellani. This might have been rendered by the corresponding vernacular name "Pig-shells," applied to certain shells of that genus (Cypraea) in some parts of England. It is worthy of note that as the name porcellana has been transferred from these shells to China-ware, so the word ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... into what he regarded as the vernacular, "you go on as Chones, all right all right. Some day, someveres—in dis case in a sleeping-car—you vake as Smidt again. You now do not remember Chones or te Chones life. You are all vorked up—vat you call it—flabbergasted. You come to Madame le Claire. Vat does she do? She ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... of the same nature. By the time I was ready to leave the recruiting offices I felt that I had made great progress in the vernacular. I said good-bye to the sergeant warmly. As I was about to leave he made the most peculiar and amusing gesture of ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... without any survivals of a prior awakening; and while centuries necessarily intervened between Homer and the "Father of History," a generation sufficed between Dante and Boccaccio, for Italian literature had only to throw off the leaden garb of Latin form to find its new dress in the vernacular. Dante certainly wrote Italian prose, but he was more at ease in verse; and while the latter provoked in him an abundance of those happy phrases which seem to have been born with the thought they express, and which pass into the familiar stock of imagery of all later ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... Jonas Miller bank account grew correspondingly fast. But the bank account, however quickly it increased, failed to give Jonas Miller and his wife full pleasure, unless, as some say, the mere knowledge of possession of wealth can bring pleasure to miserly hearts. For Jonas Miller was, in the vernacular of the Pennsylvania Dutch, "almighty close." Millie, Reists' hired girl, said," That there Jonas is too stingy to buy long enough pants for himself. I bet he gets boys' size because they're cheaper, for the legs o' them always just come to the top o' his shoes. Whoever lays him ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... brilliant literature had already been diffused. The classical labours of Joseph Scaliger, Heinsius father and son the elder Dousa, almost as famous with his pen in Latin poetry as his sword had made him in the vernacular chronicle; of Dousa the son, whom Grotius called "the crown and flower of all good learning, too soon snatched away by envious death, than whom no man more skilled in poetry, more consummate in acquaintance with ancient science and literature, had ever lived;" of Hugo Grotius himself, who ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the street watching the service. So I too stopped and watched. It was most interesting, but as the service was conducted in French (apparently the Gallican Church differs from the Roman Catholic Church in England in that the service is conducted in the vernacular), I do not know what the service was. Although most of it was in French, bits were in Latin. It was exceptionally spectacular. There were about a hundred little boys in surplices and little girls in white veils (as if dressed for confirmation), all carrying long, lighted candles. Music ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... and even while he adhered to a crude vernacular, there was, in the cadence of his voice, a forceful sort of eloquence. In the latent intensity of his personality dwelt a sheer wizardry which few ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... the terse vernacular of his calling, he gives voice to the sorrows and impatience, the humour and the resignation of his workmen comrades, and lets his songs find their own natural bent, then at length he attains real lyrical strength and sincerity.... For we need have no hesitation in hailing Mr. MacGill as ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... "I think if Dickens could read my translation he would not in the least recognize it. The fact is, Mr. Tippengray, I do not believe that your method of Greek pickling will answer to preserve our fiction for the future. It may do for histories and scientific work, but when you come to dialect and vernacular, if you once get it into Greek you can never get it back again ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... righteous indignation. Although Aristotle has retained the word, yet we may observe that 'passion' (Greek) has with him lost its affinity to the rational and has become indistinguishable from 'anger' (Greek). And to this vernacular use Plato himself in the Laws seems to revert, though not always. By modern philosophy too, as well as in our ordinary conversation, the words anger or passion are employed almost exclusively in a bad sense; there is no connotation of a just or reasonable cause by which they ...
— The Republic • Plato
... you cackle? Why do you crow? Why do you eat other people's grain? Your death is my feast; I touch you in the name of God." And saying this he puts a knife to the fowl's throat. The vernacular verse is a good imitation of the cackling of a fowl. And again, they slice off the top of an egg as if they were killing an animal and repeat the formula, "White dome, full of moisture, I know not if there ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... up from the Great Slave some time since, and was thinking of trapsing over into the Yukon country. The factor of Koshim had spoken about the discoveries on the Klondike, and he was of a mind to run over for a peep. I noticed that he spoke of the Klondike in the archaic vernacular, calling it the Reindeer River—a conceited custom that the Old Timers employ against the che-chaquas and all tenderfeet in general. But he did it so naively and as such a matter of course, that there was no sting, and I forgave him. He also had it in view, he said, before ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... but little injury, and proceeded on our way as quietly as if nothing had interrupted our course. On our arrival at the next pilot station the captain put the pilot ashore, with a parting malediction in the Swedish vernacular. ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... translation! then why have there been so few good translators? why is it that there has been such great difficulty in combining the two necessary qualities, fidelity to the original and purity in the adopted vernacular? why is it that the authorized versions of the Church are often so inferior to the original as compositions, except that the Church is bound above all things to see that the version is doctrinally correct, and in a difficult problem is obliged to put up with defects in ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... Biglow Papers, when compared with the literary speech of the time, abundantly illustrates this fact. This conservative tendency is especially noticeable in districts remote from literary centres, and those of us who are familiar with the vernacular in Vermont or Maine will recall in it many quaint words and expressions which literature abandoned long ago. In Virginia locutions may be heard which have scarcely been current in literature since Shakespeare's ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... and filth and heathenism, we forget what our chief aim should be, not simply school-work for the children, but Christianization and civilization for the masses. This, in its greatest effectiveness, can be done at the out-stations and in the vernacular only. It is necessary to have the gospel preached constantly in order to have it penetrate these darkened hearts, preached in a tongue which can be understood, and necessary to have a Christian life lived in its simplicity in their ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 4, April, 1889 • Various
... have meant to Dutch literature. Just imagine the Colloquia written in the racy Dutch of the sixteenth century! What could he not have produced if, instead of gleaning and commenting upon classic Adagia, he had, for his themes, availed himself of the proverbs of the vernacular? To us such a proverb is perhaps even more sapid than the sometimes slightly ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... readers the most interesting of Aelfric's writings is his Colloquium, designed to teach Latin in the monastery at Winchester. The pupils were required to learn the Latin translation of his dialogues in the Anglo-Saxon vernacular. Some of these dialogues are today valuable illustrations of the social and industrial life of the time. The following is part of the conversation between the Teacher and ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... period, which is written in a language nearly as hard for a modern Englishman to read as German is, or Dutch. Caedmon and Cynewulf are no more a part of English literature than Vergil and Horace are of Italian. I have also left out {8} the vernacular literature of the Scotch before the time of Burns. Up to the date of the union Scotland was a separate kingdom, and its literature had a development independent of the English, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... hand, had gripped life with no uncertain hold; she, according to the vernacular of her hills, "had the call to larn," ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... world to do but stare about him. He helped me to throw off the European and plunge into the native way of living. With him I rode about the plain of Sharon, sojourning among the fellahin, and sitting in the coffee-shops of Ramleh, Lydda, Gaza, meeting all sorts of people, and acquiring the vernacular without an effort, in the manner of amusement. From dawn to sunset we were in the saddle. We went on pilgrimage to Nebi Rubin, the mosque upon the edge of marshes by the sea, half-way to Gaza; we rode ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... A lady equally admired for her modesty, the beauty of her person, and the excellency of her talents. Gaia, says Tiraboschi, may perhaps lay claim to the praise of having been the first among the Italian ladies, by whom the vernacular poetry was cultivated. Ibid. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... It has been already observed that Naples was a Greek colony, and consequently Greek appears to have continued the vernacular tongue.] ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... Hegel. The language of Plato or even of Aristotle is but slightly removed from that of common life, and was introduced naturally by a series of thinkers: the language of the scholastic logic has become technical to us, but in the Middle Ages was the vernacular Latin of priests and students. The higher spirit of philosophy, the spirit of Plato and Socrates, rebels against the Hegelian use of language as mechanical ...
— Sophist • Plato
... he died, for he was the pattern of the ideal german scholar, as daringly original in his thought as he was homely in his life, a modest, genial, laborious slave to truth and learning, and withal the owner of an admirable literary style of the vernacular sort. The materialistic generation, that in the fifties and sixties called his speculations fantastic, had been replaced by one with greater liberty of imagination, and a Preyer, a Wundt, a Paulsen, and a Lasswitz could now speak of Fechner as ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... century Conrad von Megenberg (1309-98) produced his Book of Nature, a complete work on natural history, the first of the kind in the vernacular, founded on Latin versions, now rendered direct from the Greek, of the Aristotelian and Galenic biological works. It is well ordered and opens with a systematic account of the structure and physiology of man as a type of the animal creation, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... rode to dances with a shawl thrown over her skirt; who wore her hair cropped and curling all over her head; who answered indifferently to the name of William or Bill; whose speech was heavy with the flowers of the vernacular; who could act in amateur theatricals, play on the banjo, rule eight servants and two horses, their accounts and their diseases, and look men slowly and deliberately between the eyes—yea, after they had proposed to her ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... reading lesson, without which there can be no serious teaching of the vernacular. By their means the teacher enters into communication with his pupils; he gets them to speak, he corrects their errors, trains their reason, and forms their taste. It has been said that a teacher able to explain selections in prose and poetry "holds his class in the hollow ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... most sympathetic of vocations, whose appeal more than any other is direct to the feelings, could not induce him to tell a sympathetic lie. Would that the writers and speakers of plain English, and of their mother-tongue in every vernacular, might take example from the conscientious creator, who would not put a particle of cant into the crooked marks and ruled bars which are such a mystery to the uninitiated, blot with one demi-semi-quaver of falsehood his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... course of preparatory and professional study. The college is undoubtedly the place where the evil, if it be admitted to exist, should be corrected. And its correction would be found in the greater progress of the student, beyond the task of composition, to the examination of the most approved vernacular writings. It is not so much by his own imperfect attempts as by familiarity with the nature and finished productions of other minds, that he may expect to facilitate his conceptions, to extend the circle of his thoughts, to correct his judgment ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... hundred copies of the Hebrew-Spanish Pentateuch, in two volumes, 16mo., with the Hebrew on the opposite page. The Sefardim, or Spanish Jews, having the New Testament previously, were now favored with the whole inspired volume in their vernacular tongue. ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... vernacular, farming was hard work,—damned hard work. It was not, however, the amount of toil it involved that daunted him, but its quality. He had always felt a hearty and only thinly veiled contempt for manual labor; moreover, he considered life in a small ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... although he ever remained a bachelor and abhorred womankind, nevertheless tried to demonstrate that not only was polygamy lawful, but that it was a blessed estate commanded by God. He first brought out a dialogue written in the vernacular entitled Sinceri Wahrenbergs kurzes Gespraech von der Polygamie; and this little work was followed by a second book, Das Koenigliche Marck aller Laender (Freyburg, 1676, in-4). Then he produced another work, entitled Theophili Aletaei discursus politicus ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... is to him the 'exhaustive generalizer,' beyond whom it is folly to aspire, and by whose stature he measures the nations. Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, are only brisk young men translating into the vernacular wittily his good things. St. Augustine, Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg also 'say after him.' Emerson either addresses men whose ignorance he greatly exaggerates, or else the ideal men of some centuries hence. His mission ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... beginning to feel that he must look out for a night's encampment, he saw in the distance, through the gigantic trees, a young girl running at her utmost speed, or, as he expressed it in the Crockett vernacular, "streaking it along through the woods like all wrath." David gave chase, and soon overtook the terrified girl, whom he found, to his surprise and delight, to be his own sweetheart, who had also by ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... chuck it in the boat, Jess," commanded Rob. "Now you mush on!" he ordered the Aleut, pointing to the carcass of the bear. ("Mush on," in Alaska dog-train vernacular, means "march on," being a corruption ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... Hindoo and a brother to the man who knows his vernacular. And a Frenchman is French because he speaks his own language. But the American has no language. He is dialect, slang, provincialism, accent, and so forth. Now that I have heard their voices, all the beauty of Bret Harte is being ruined for me, because ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... literary clubs and circles bellowed extracts from Goethe and Schiler in the German, shaking his fists, purple with vehemence. The Cherokee, arrayed in fringed buckskin and blue beads, rented from a costumer, intoned folk songs of his people in the vernacular. The elocutionist in cheese-cloth toga and tin bracelets, rendered "The Isles of Greece, where burning Sappho loved and sung." The Chinaman, in the robes of a mandarin, lectured on Confucius. The Armenian, in fez and baggy ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... is eight inches high, from head to feet, and nine and a half inches wide, from wing tip to wing tip. Heraldically, "Un Aigle Eploye" it would be called. That is, an eagle in the act of taking flight—in the vernacular, a "spread eagle." The eagle looks to the left, with its wings half expanded. In its talons it grasps a thunderbolt, as in the old Roman standard. Those who have ever wandered into the Monastery ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... of the vernacular literatures of modern Europe; and it is a consequence of this that its relations with Latin literature have been the closest. All the vernacular literatures have been influenced by the Latin, but of Anglo-Saxon literature alone can it be said that ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... Asiatic down because he thought the man was a fool, whereas he himself was ignorant of what was going on. The message the coolie was bringing was misunderstood by the conceited assistant, and as a result of having just this smattering of the vernacular, he ran his firm in for a loss of fifty ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... you what is Latin for Constitution, will not make you a particle the wiser; I will, therefore, explain it in the vernacular tongue.—Constitution then, in its primary, abstract, and true signification, is a concatenation or coacervation of simple, distinct parts, of various qualities or properties, united, compounded, or constituted in such a manner, as to form or compose a system or body, when ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... "rheumatiz," and good counsel to all; and kept the coal and clothes' clubs going, for yule-tide, when the bands of mummers came round, dressed out in ribbons and coloured paper caps, and stamped round the Squire's kitchen, repeating in true sing-song vernacular the legend of St. George and his fight, and the ten-pound doctor, who plays his part at healing the Saint—a relic, I believe, of the old Middle-age mysteries. It was the first dramatic representation which greeted the eyes of little Tom, who was brought down into the kitchen by his nurse to witness ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... died away Hira Singh rose to reply, for he was the cadet of a royal house, the son of a king's son, and knew what was due on these occasions. Thus he spoke in the vernacular: - "Colonel Sahib and officers of this regiment. Much honour have you done me. This will I remember. We came down from afar to play you. But we were beaten." (" No fault of yours, Ressaidar Sahib. Played on our own ground, y' know. Your ponies were ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... many stately castles, each of which contained a miniature of an imperial court. It was there that the spirit of chivalry first laid aside its terrors, first took a humane and graceful form, first appeared as the inseparable associate of art and literature, of courtesy and love. The other vernacular dialects which, since the fifth century, had sprung up in the ancient provinces of the Roman empire, were still rude and imperfect. The sweet Tuscan, the rich and energetic English, were abandoned to artisans and shepherds. No clerk had ever ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... with his head in a turmoil. His heart beat loud in his ears. "I've made her mad with me," he said to himself, using the old rustic school-boy vernacular, from which he did not always depart in his thoughts, although his ministerial dignity guarded his conversations. Thomas Merriam came of a simple homely stock, whose speech came from the emotions of the heart, all unregulated by the usages of the schools. He was ...
— Evelina's Garden • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... derision he refused to believe in the little "corporal's" voluntary desertion, and from the first moment began to agitate. What! punish a hero for his heroism? That, in Four Eyes' vilely profane opinion, expressed with elaborate expletives in the Legion's own choicest vernacular, was what it would amount to if St. George were branded "deserter." Precisely why Max had joined Stanton's caravan instead of returning to Sidi-bel-Abbes, perhaps a few days late, Four Eyes was not certain; ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... swallowed dryly. Ewbert noticed how he had dropped more and more into the vernacular, in these reminiscences; in their controversies he had used the language of books and had spoken like a cultivated man, but now he ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... in very modern English, and has not affected the archaisms commonly found in tales of the time. To this he would reply, that if the genuine language were preserved, it would be utterly unintelligible to modern Englishmen, and therefore he has thought it preferable to translate into the vernacular of today. The English which men spoke then was no more stilted or formal to them than ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... Doggie. And Peddle, unaccustomed to the vernacular of the British Army, paled with horror. "Oh, hell!" said Doggie. "Look here, Peddle, just you get on a bicycle, or a motor-car, or an express train at once and retrieve that uniform. Don't you understand? I'm a private soldier. I've ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... injuriously called these real histories) extending beyond four volumes, and if I did not agree to the first four being published separately, he threatened to decline the article. (Oh, ignorance! as if the vernacular article of our mother English were capable of declension.) Whereupon, somewhat moved by his remonstrances, and more by heavy charges for print and paper, which he stated to have been already incurred, I have resolved ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... at Marion Hayden's in the evenings, and from things he let fall, Clayton gathered that the irresponsible group which centered about Marion was, in the boy's own vernacular, rather "shot to pieces." Tommy Hale had gone to England to join the Royal Flying Corps. One or two of them were in Canada, trying to enlist there, and one evening Graham brought home to dinner an inordinately tall and thin ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... habit to write in the language of the country where he was residing—French, when he was in his house on the Champs Elysees; Italian, when he was in his villa at Baiae; and so on. When he was in his own country he felt himself free to deviate sometimes from the vernacular into whatever language were aptest to his frame of mind. In his sterner moods he gravitated to Latin, and wrought the noble iron of that language to effects that were, if anything, a trifle over-impressive. ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... vernacular—and Wee Willie Winkie had a colloquial acquaintance with three—was easy to the boy who could not yet manage his "r's" and ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... circle; hands and head in wild motion. Around him, spell-bound, squatted the ring of his dark-faced and unwashed hearers. The superintendent, being with his own people, was orating in pure Arabic—or, rather, in the colloquial vernacular which is as close to pure Arabic as one can expect to hear, except among ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... comparatively diminutive scale, and with the top of his hair very curiously cut in a circular form. He professed his readiness to accompany us immediately into the receptacle of departed imperial grandeur. He spoke Latin with myself, and his vernacular tongue with the valet. I was soon satisfied with the sepulchral spectacle. As a whole, it has a poor and even disagreeable effect: if you except one or two tombs, such as those of Francis I. Emperor of the Romans, and Maria Theresa—which latter is the most elaborately ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... a play that transports the hedge rows, the farm kitchen with its dresser and turf fire, and above all the real vernacular right into our preception more vividly than an experience. The author has written a remarkable fine play of life, humour, and realism.—Nomad's Weekly ...
— The Turn of the Road - A Play in Two Scenes and an Epilogue • Rutherford Mayne
... the people of color in the United States will never be prevailed over to abandon the land of their birth, and every thing vernacular with them—to forego many advantages which they now possess, and many more which they have in prospect, for the imaginary, or if real, the fleeting and short-lived honors held out to them by our "Americo-African ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... Arch-duchess Anne and The Young Princess. There are also the humorous and pathetic studies in Roadside Philosophers and the like, in which, forty years ago, Meredith anticipated, with the dignity of a poet, the vernacular studies of others. And, finally, there is a section containing poems of impassioned meditation, beginning with the lofty and sustained ode to France, December 1870, and ending with the volcanic volume of Odes in Contribution to the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... into the lapidary style of ancient Rome, I confess it is often hard to improve on the brevity of the vernacular, though the admonition "to keep your end up" can be condensed from four words to two in "sursum cauda." Again the familiar eulogy, "Stout fellow," can be rendered in a single word by the Virgilian epithet "bellipotens." A distinguished Latinist recalls in this context the sentiment ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 12, 1917 • Various
... consideration for its thousands of English readers. There is, however, we are tolerably assured, a certain class of critics who venture to lament that this laughter-inspiring muse should have descended from the sunny Parnassus of its own vernacular to the meads below, where disport the unlearned and uninspired, the mere kids and lambs of its celestial audience: a generous absurdity, at which the very Devil of Delphos might have demurred. These are the dapper gentlemen, who, tripping gayly along to the blasts and tinklings of Lanner's ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... left alone at Heidelberg, in his own unassisted weakness, at such a distance from us all, I should not be surprised to hear that he had constituted himself the lord and master of some blue-eyed fraeulein with whom he could not exchange a dozen words in her own vernacular, and had become a dis-respectable pater familias at nineteen. In the midst of all the worry and anxiety which these considerations occasion, we are living here a most unsettled, flurried life of divided work and ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... down in crabbed Latin in dry folios for a few learned monks, as in Copernicus's time, but promulgated and argued in rich Italian, illustrated by analogy, by experiment, and with cultured wit; taught not to a few scholars here and there in musty libraries, but proclaimed in the vernacular to the whole populace with all the energy and enthusiasm of a recent convert and a master of language! Had a bombshell been exploded among the fossilized professors it ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... works of Martin Luther were those by which he gave to the common people a vernacular Bible and vernacular worship, that through the one, God might speak directly to the people; and in the other, the people might speak directly to God. Luther's Bible and Luther's Hymns gave life not only to the churches of the Reformation, but ...
— The Hymns of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... the owner of a small, hilly farm. He had inherited his rugged acres from his father, had always lived upon them, and the feeling had grown strong with the lapse of time that he could live nowhere else. Yet he knew that he was, in the vernacular of the region, "going down-hill." The small savings of years were slowly melting away, and the depressing feature of this truth was that he did not see how he could help himself. He was not a sanguine man, but rather one ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... set me to committing to memory the whole of Andrews' Latin Grammar. I gained the important information that "sto, fido, confido, assuesco, and preditus" govern the ablative, and other valuable lore; but when I asked the teacher where the Latin vernacular came in, she replied that that would come to me later—that I must "open my mouth and shut my eyes while she gave me something to make me wise." A solemn awe not unmixed with envy pervaded the schoolroom as I, parrot-like, ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss |
