"Vocabulary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which belonged to him in common with his family required much practice to develop it. With strong sense, and the greatest readiness of wit, a certain tendency to hesitation was hereditary in the line of Fox. This hesitation arose, not from the poverty, but from the wealth of their vocabulary. They paused, not from the difficulty of finding one expression, but from the difficulty of choosing between several. It was only by slow degrees and constant exercise that the first Lord Holland and his son overcame the defect. Indeed neither of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... employs in telling these stories may seem at first glance to be simple: short sentences, a sparse vocabulary, uncomplicated syntax. In actuality, Anderson developed an artful style in which, following Mark Twain and preceding Ernest Hemingway, he tried to use American speech as the base of a tensed rhythmic prose that has an economy and a shapeliness seldom found in ordinary speech or even oral narration. ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... Rylance, who was to be invited to join the exploration party, much to the disgust of the Winchester lads, who denounced her as a stuck-up minx, and distinguished her with various other epithets of an abusive character selected from a vocabulary known only to Wyckhamists. Blanche and Horatio and a smaller boy, called Ernest, who was dressed like a gillie, and had all the wildness of a young Highlander, were to walk, with the occasional charity of ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... our neighborhood and I visited him often. To get to his cabinets, it was necessary to go through his garden where thorn-apples and cacti grew abundantly, and where they kept a gray parrot, brought from Gaboon, whose vocabulary consisted of words learnt from ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... not, of course, write any language whatever. Two words of French he knew: they were fromage and chapeau. The former he pronounced "grumidge." In English his vocabulary was even more simple, consisting of the single word "po-lees-man." Neither B. nor myself understood a syllable of Polish (tho' we subsequently learned Jin-dobri, nima-Zatz, zampni-pisk and shimay pisk, and used to delight The Zulu hugely ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... this were no doubt rare, indeed, hardly ever occurred except in his intercourse with familiars and, more especially, fellow-countrymen—sometimes also with pupils. In passing I may remark that Chopin's Polish vocabulary was much less choice than his French one. As a rule, Chopin's manners were very refined and aristocratic, Mr. Halle thinks they were too much so. For this refinement resulted in a uniform amiability which left ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... most remarkable characteristics of the Semitic family of speech is its conservatism and resistance to change. As compared with the other languages of the world, its grammar and vocabulary have alike undergone but little alteration in the course of the centuries during which we can trace its existence. The very words which were used by the Babylonians four or five thousand years ago, can still be heard, with the same meaning attached to them, ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... /n./ The Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, one of the wellsprings of hacker culture. The 1959 "Dictionary of the TMRC Language" compiled by Peter Samson included several terms that became basics of the hackish vocabulary (see esp. {foo}, {mung}, ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... from a vocabulary published by Messrs. Teichelmann, and Schurmann, German Missionaries to the Aborigines, will give an idea of the nature of the songs of the ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... really think so? I consider that a great compliment from you, for I have often tried to repress myself, fearing that my impulsive and sometimes passionate speech would offend your taste, you who are outwardly so cold. Do you know, I have a whole vocabulary of endearing terms ready to be poured into your ears as soon as you begin to ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... [The vocabulary Hwei Hwei (Mahomedan) of the College of Interpreters at Peking transcribes King chao from the Persian Kin-chang, a name it gives to the Shen-si province. King chao was called Ngan-si fu in 1277. (Deveria, Epigraphie, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Prose on several occasions, has A Letter from LEXIPHANES[1179]; containing Proposals for a Glossary or Vocabulary of the Vulgar Tongue: intended as a Supplement to a larger DICTIONARY. It is evidently meant as a sportive sally of ridicule on Johnson, whose style is thus imitated, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... he admitted, as a tell-tale smile again hovered about his lips. He was thinking of the changes that he must presently make in Miss Polly's vocabulary. ...
— Polly of the Circus • Margaret Mayo
... Some of it is based on downright wilfulness. I have seen him do without things he really wanted, rather than unbend and say the necessary "Ta-ta" which stands for both "please" and "thanks" in his still limited vocabulary. The little Hun will also fall on his picture-books, at times, and do his best to tear the linen pages apart, flailing them about in the air with genuine Berserker madness. But along with this, ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... and exciting. We dealt in millions as if they were checkers. These practical men have a better grip on life than the cynics and dreamers like you. You call them plebeian and bourgeois and Philistine and limited—all the bad names in your select vocabulary. But they know how to feel in the good, old, common-sense way. You've lost that. I like plebeian earnestness and push. I like success at something, and hearty enjoyment, and good dinners, and big men who talk about a million as if it were a ten-spot ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... Delbridge, and the clerks and stenographers seemed unreal creatures, with flaccid, vacuous faces, as he shook hands with them and answered their conventional queries about his vacation. "Vacation!" The word was not in his vocabulary. "Business! "That, too, was a corpse of a word floating on the still waters of past usage. "Money, stocks, bonds, market-reports!" They seemed like forgotten enemies rising to stop him. How could Delbridge smile in his smug way, as he chewed his cigar and boasted ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... government," he might "go and live among the Indians," and even offered to facilitate the orator's self-expatriation among the savages: "I know of several nations that live very happily; and I can furnish him with a vocabulary of their language."[394] ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... the comparative degree had been entirely left out of Will's make-up and that things were usually of the superlative. "Worst," "best," "poorest," "finest" were adjectives most commonly to be found in his vocabulary, and between the two extremes a great gulf appeared to be fixed. He had also declared that he looked for Will to occupy no middle ground. He would either be a pronouncedly successful man or an equally ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... pen of Dr. Prior was read at a Conversazione of the Society at Taunton, in the winter of 1871, and as it treats the subject from a more general point of view than is usually taken of it, we print it with his permission as an introduction to our vocabulary:— ...
— A Glossary of Provincial Words & Phrases in use in Somersetshire • Wadham Pigott Williams
... mother of abominations, Antichrist, Babylon. That age is prodigal in offensive epithets; kings and prelates and doctors alike use hard words. They are like angry children and women and pugilists; their vocabulary of abuse is amusing and inexhaustible. See how prodigal Shakspeare and Ben Jonson are in the language of vituperation. But they were all defiant and fierce, for the age was rough and earnest. The Pope, in wrath, hurls the old ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... premium paid, an equivalent may be demanded. No Mason, or no lodge, is bound to give pecuniary or other aid to a Brother, unless he really needs. The word " benefit," as usually used in the modern friendly societies, has no place in the vocabulary of Freemasonry. If a wealthy Brother is afflicted with sorrow or sickness, we are to strive to comfort him with our sympathy, our kindness, and our attention, but we are to bestow our eleemosynary aid only on the indigent ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... before the foremost succeeded in laying hands upon me, a newcomer, resplendent in glittering uniform, with an inflamed, almost purple face, leaped madly forth from the opposite side of the mast and began laying about him vigorously with an iron pin, making use meanwhile of a vocabulary of choice Spanish epithets such as I never ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... friends of his, who were camping there for the night. I approached the social group with the feelings of a ghoul, shook my fists in the coachman's face and talked exceedingly loud, making free use of all the bad words in Bengalee of which my then limited vocabulary would admit, placing particular emphasis upon the scathing soour ("pig") and the withering gudha ("fool")—epithets more dreaded by the Hindoos than the most profane oaths. The man jabbered something in his native tongue, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... certainly very like the Port Jackson cow-ee, whence comes the one aboriginal word of universal employment in Australia to-day, the coo-ee of the townsman and the bushman alike, a call entered in the vocabulary collected by Hunter ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... this new thought to heart or not, certain it is that he kept zealously to lessons and Mr. Fane, took kindly to Inna, and called her "a little brick," and all the many flattering names found in a boy's vocabulary. But his wound would not heal, for which the weather was blamed, and the constant friction he gave it, until his two doctors advised he should not race about so much; and so it came about that November ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield
... of an adventurous otter in search of a variation of diet were viewed in their proper light. Amanda's normally placid temperament reasserted itself. Even a hurricane of shouted curses, coming from her husband's dressing-room, in her husband's voice, but hardly in his usual vocabulary, failed to disturb her serenity as she made a leisurely toilet one evening ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... impulsive, intemperate in his emotions and their expression, he was the perfect counterpart of the men who were working night and day in the North to create a condition of mob feeling out of which a civil conflict might grow. Uncle Tom's Cabin had set him on fire with new hatreds. His vocabulary of profanity had been enlarged by the addition of every name in the novel. He had been compelled to invent new expressions to fit these characters. He damned them individually and collectively. He cursed each trait of each character, good and bad. He cursed the good points ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... in late autumn become frankly impossible. The native word "macnoon," by the way, in spite of its suggestion of respectable Highland clans, was regarded as the only one adequate to describe a camel at this time of year, and was therefore added to our vocabulary. They are noisy, vicious, unaccommodating and aggravating to a degree. A lance-corporal of the Battalion of great girth and tank-like prowess in the football field was always ready to bear bitter testimony to their man-eating proclivities, and no doubt still regards ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... contains a Narrative of the Voyage to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-choo Island; an Appendix, containing Nautical details; and a Vocabulary of ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... "function" or "coordinate" or "puberty" or "adolescence" or other academic terms, the layman must force simple words at every turn; and in any attempts to describe what a parent should say to a child, the layman should take care that a child's comprehension is reached and that the parent is guided as, to vocabulary. Both speakers should lift the level of their counsels above that of mere physical prudence; they should explain and duly emphasize the ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... No vocabulary of the Servants' Hall could have encompassed the fine phrase grand seigneur, but, when Mrs. Blayne and the rest talked of him in their least resentful and more amiable moods, they unconsciously made efforts to express ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... simply blind force, but that some intelligence directed it, or at least was associated with it. The noises, whereof I have spoken, were repeated a determinate number of times. They became either strong or feeble, at my request, and came from different places. By a vocabulary of signals previously agreed upon, the power answered questions, and gave messages with more ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... their great philological and poetical value, had been inaccessible to all but students of the difficult and faded MS. in the British Museum: they have been now made public by the Society's edition, with their large additions to our vocabulary, and their interesting dialectal formations. The Sir Gawayne, from the same MS., could only have been had before in Sir Frederick Madden's rare and costly edition, printed by the Bannatyne Club. And the Lauder has restored, as it were, to Scotland, a Poet whose ...
— Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue - A Treates, noe shorter than necessarie, for the Schooles • Alexander Hume
... that our classes were distinguishable by their speech, and that certain words (for instance) were tapu on the quarter-deck of a man-of-war; and he begged in consequence that we should watch and correct him on the point. We were able to assure him that he was beyond correction. His vocabulary is apt and ample to an extraordinary degree. God knows where he collected it, but by some instinct or some accident he has avoided all profane or gross expressions. 'Obliged,' 'stabbed,' 'gnaw,' 'lodge,' 'power,' 'company,' 'slender,' 'smooth,' and 'wonderful,' are a few of the unexpected words ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... restraint that is inflicted on these individuals in the gilded drawing-room at home, the more do they crave after the unshackled enjoyment of their animal vulgarity abroad. Their principal characteristics are a love of large plaids, and a choice vocabulary of popular idiomatic forms of speech; and these will sufficiently define them in the saloons of the theatres and in the cigar divans. But they are not ever thus. By no means. At home (which does not naturally indicate their own house), having donned ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... may be its members. We must always bear in mind that the general well-being and easy circumstances of the French middle classes is greatly owing to their freedom from shams. Toil is not regarded as a degradation, and the hateful word "gentility" is not found in their vocabulary. Thus it comes about that you find a mixture of homeliness, comfort, and solidity of fortune, rarely the case in England. Take my landlady as an example, a charming person, who keeps a straw-hat and umbrella shop, whose sister ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... moment Jackum drew his attention with a touch, and began making hideous grimaces at the creature, while the others began to shout and were apparently calling it every opprobrious name that their limited vocabulary supplied. ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... a familiar word in the vocabulary of James Madison, and he may well have prayed to be delivered from the hands of his friends, if this was to be the keynote of their defense of his policy in West Florida. Nevertheless, he was impelled in spite of himself in the direction of Clay's vision. If West Florida in the hands of ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... redeem men than the works of the law. All this may have been true, but truth lies in relation. It was not true when I, understanding what I understood by it, taught it to men who professed to believe in the Westminster Confession. The preacher who preaches it uses a vocabulary which has a certain definite meaning, and has had this meaning for centuries. He cannot stay to put his own interpretation upon it whenever it is upon his lips, and so his hearers are in a false position, and imagine him to be much more orthodox ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... us while eating, we were in no degree astonished, but continued our meal as if unconscious of their presence. One yellow dame, however, was determined not to be ignored, and insisted on speaking English, of which she had a vocabulary of four or five words, picked up in her intercourse with American sailors at the port of Truxillo. We were hungry, and did not much heed her; whereupon she disappeared, as if piqued, but soon returned with what she evidently regarded as an irresistible appeal to our interest, in the shape of a ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... budget of Escurial gossip, Nignio de Zuniga had his own grievances to confide. Uppermost in his mind, was the irritation of having been employed that morning in a cow-hunt; and from execrations on the name of the old woman, enriched with all the blasphemies of a trooper's vocabulary,—it was no difficult matter to glide to the general misdemeanours and malefactions of the sex. For Gabriel Nignio was a man of iron,—bred in camps, with as little of the milk of human kindness in his nature as his royal master King Philip; and it was his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... joined her in a flow of vituperative wit at the expense of their mother and other relatives, incidentally brought in. Instead of being aghast, I enjoyed it, and was feverish with a desire to be as brilliant, for my vocabulary was deficient and my sense of inferiority was active during the whole of my visit in Belem. I blushed often, smiled foolishly, and was afflicted with a general apprehension ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... that semi-apathetic state known as "east half south," as it not unfrequently happens that he is. He compels his bearers to tax their powers of endurance to the utmost, urging them by all the endearing epithets in the nautical vocabulary to unheard-of exertions, regardless of the luckless ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... Alecto's maddening finger pressed on the soul-hurt, no man is responsible. After the furious storm of upbubbling curses had spent itself there was a little calm, not of surcease but of vacuity, since even the cursing vocabulary has its limitations. Then a grouping of words long forgotten arrayed itself before him, like the handwriting on the wall of Belshazzer's ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... of words for an idea or an entity, and the English has not, but when English has the richer vocabulary, why not avail oneself of the variety possible? The Latin word "finis," for example, used in so many connections, can be rendered by one word in one connection and by another in another connection. The "goal" or the "object" of providence is plainer than the "end" of providence. The "close" of ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... detect nothing to excite suspicion. An extreme curiosity, says Horace Walpole,[2232] or a great familiarity with things, is necessary to detect the slightest intimacy between the two sexes. No familiarity is allowed except under the guise of friendship, while the vocabulary of love is as much prohibited as its rites apparently are. Even with Crebillon fils, even with Laclos, at the most exciting moments, the terms their characters employ are circumspect and irreproachable. Whatever indecency there may be, it is never expressed in words, the sense of propriety ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... talks so little, he has quite a considerable vocabulary. This morning he used a surprisingly good word. He evidently recognized, himself, that it was a good one, for he worked in in twice afterward, casually. It was good casual art, still it showed that he possesses a certain quality of ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... retiring nature. He was of about the average height and, although quite advanced in years when I knew him, his hair had not changed color. His manner was exceeding gentle and, strange to say, with such a remarkable vocabulary at his command, in society he was exceedingly quiet. In his early life Irving was engaged to be married to one of his own ethereal kind, but she passed onward, and among his friends the subject was never broached as it seemed too sacred to dwell upon. Her ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... be confessed Cartwright here discovers a deep knowledge of human nature. He knew the power of ridicule and of invective. At a later day, a writer of the same stamp, in "The Second Wash, or the Moore Scoured once more," (written against Dr. Henry More, the Platonist), in defence of that vocabulary of names which he has poured on More, asserts it is a practice allowed by the high authority of Christ himself. I transcribe the curious passage:—"It is the practice of Christ himself to character men by those things to which they assimilate. Thus hath ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... am proud to have enriched so full a vocabulary. But I am still waiting for the word I want. (He grows serious.) Isabel, look in your heart—give me the first word you find there. You've no idea how much a beggar can ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... Did we not agree that Villeneuve-Loubet was superb? Perhaps we were artists? So many artists came here to paint and sketch the old houses. What was our impression of her country? We knew that she meant by "country" not France but Villeneuve-Loubet, and mustered our best vocabulary to admire the town, the solid foundations, the houses, the protecting castle, and above all, ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... feigned, as is often the case in these instances of arrested mental development. However that may have been, on the occasion of this visit I found him marvellously improved, his hair cut, his nondescript garments evolved into a modest sort of livery, his vocabulary no longer a series of grunts, his very pantomime more elastic. Margarita never changed her old methods of communication with him, but the rest of us, at Miss Jencks's earnest entreaty, fatigued ourselves amiably in order to elicit the guttural "yes" ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... see how the same vocabulary is transferred to the warfare for social betterment, "campaign," "warfare," "battle," "fight," "weapon," "corps," "army." And the fight to be won can only come through knowledge, its dissemination and then ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... a short courtship—delay was a word not found in Ralph Buckner's vocabulary. We were married and began our life at his ranch, which, as I say, was near enough to my father so that we could be in frequent communication. He had been much concerned about me, having discovered more of my homesickness for the East than I had realized, so to see me well settled and apparently ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... in language. Our timbre of voice, our articulation, and our vocabulary, like our physiognomy, have about them something individual, and error often arises from overlooking this, and hastily reading common interpretations into exceptional cases. The misunderstandings that arise even among the most open ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... so quick to give things names—and so liberal about it that, to the embarrassment and undoing of the unhappy foreigner, they sometimes invent fifty names for one thing—have added so many words to the vocabulary since August, 1914, that a glossary, and perhaps more than one, has been published to enshrine them. Without the assistance of this glossary it is almost impossible to read some of the numerous ...
— Punch, Volume 153, July 11, 1917 - Or the London Charivari. • Various
... of abuse known to the Huron vocabulary that the disappointed women did not lavishly expend on the successful stranger. They flouted at his efforts, and told him with bitter scoffs that his feet were better than his hands, and that he merited wings, while he knew not the use ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... beat it." Although Jerry was earnestly endeavoring to eliminate slang from her vocabulary, she could not ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... got some vocabulary!" laughed Dick. "Think a lot of your team, don't you—sometimes! Yes, you got here in plenty ...
— The Boy Ranchers on Roaring River - or Diamond X and the Chinese Smugglers • Willard F. Baker
... sailor, who vented his anger in another way, by bestowing on the convicts the worst names in his maritime vocabulary. ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... made a mistake, the lady further addressed the waiter and asked, "Do they always drink cold coffee in Java?" The waiter, who could only stand passive while this calm robbery was committed—for had not the whole company to wait for a second brew—made reply with the only English of his vocabulary, "yes." X., who had the doubtful advantage of understanding as well as seeing all that was going on, glared fiercely as he saw himself deprived of the only portion of the meal which was at all likely to be good, and could willingly have caused an interruption ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... the Early English Text Society the Troy Book, translated from Guido di Colonna, puts forward a plea for Huchowne as its author, to whom he would also assign the Morte Arthure (ed. Perry) and the Pistel of Sweet Susan.[8] But Mr. Donaldson seems to have been misled by the similarity of vocabulary, which is not at all a safe criterion in judging of works written in a Northumbrian, West or East Midland speech. The dialect, I venture to think, is a far safer test. A careful examination of the Troy Book compels me to differ in toto from Mr. Donaldson, ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... of voices being heard by two persons, while one alone saw the figures, seems a clear proof that the figures were hallucinatory. It seems probable that the sounds also were hallucinatory, but were what is called in the vocabulary of the S.P.R. the "collective" hallucination of two persons. This seems to render it highly probable that in the case of each the hallucination had a cause external to both, although common to both; moreover, hallucinations are often contagious. The Times correspondent states, that "the lady ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... to stimulate spontaneous conversation, even on simple subjects, without the aid of a French model, not only is hazardous but often becomes aimless, and at best results in the acquisition of a limited vocabulary. Furthermore, it requires a skilful teacher to adapt to such purposes the substance of a text prepared with a ...
— French Conversation and Composition • Harry Vincent Wann
... might possibly have admired the rhetorical force of the following outburst, but, considering that the "HE" here gibbeted in capitals was no less a personage than the "heaven-born minister" himself, a plain man might well have wondered what additional force the vocabulary of Jacobinism could have infused into the language of Pantisocracy. After summing up the crimes of the Reign of Terror the lecturer asks: "Who, my brethren, was the cause of this guilt if not HE who ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... no precedent, and no vocabulary. They had come across death raw and real, uncooked by religion, undeodorised by the sayings of ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... suggested the character of his language. Chaucer was then the "God of English poetry;" his was the one name which filled a place apart in the history of English verse. Spenser was a student of Chaucer, and borrowed as he judged fit, not only from his vocabulary, but from his grammatical precedents and analogies, with the object of giving an appropriate colouring to what was to be raised as far as possible above familiar life. Besides this, the language was still in such an unsettled state that from a ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... wood, like the Samaritan woman's in a picture of Nicol'o Poussin! and there is such a wood without the park, enjoying such a prospect! and there is such a mountain on t'other side of the park commanding all prospects, that I wore out my eyes with gazing, my feet with climbing, and my tongue and my vocabulary with commending! The best notion I can give you of the satisfaction I showed, was, that Sir George proposed to carry me to dine with my Lord Foley; and when I showed reluctance, he said, "Why, I thought you did not mind any strangers, if you were to see any ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... says: 'I shall be ere long as greasy as an Alsatian bully,' comes third; and Mrs. Behn's reference to Alsatia in this play, which is often ignored, claims fourth place. We then have Shadwell's famous comedy, The Squire of Alsatia (1688), with its well-known vocabulary of Alsatian jargon and slang, its scenes in Whitefriars, the locus classicus, a veritable mine of information. The particular portions of Whitefriars forming Alsatia were Ram-Alley, Mitre Court, and a lane called in the local cant Lombard Street. No. 50 of Tempest's Cries of London ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... essay on Style that the literary artist "begets a vocabulary faithful to the colouring of his own spirit, and in the strictest sense original." Do you find that ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Terrace, and a plan of the hall and staircase, on my dinner-card. He was distinctly ungrateful; in fact, he remarked that he had been born in this very house, but would not trust himself to find his way upstairs with my plan as a guide. He also said the American vocabulary was vastly amusing, so ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... all-pervading fluid the physicist terms the ether, and he thinks of it as having no weight. In effect, then, the physicist has dispossessed the many imponderables in favor of a single imponderable—though the word imponderable has been banished from his vocabulary. In this view the ether—which, considered as a recognized scientific verity, is essentially a nineteenth-century discovery—is about the most interesting thing in the universe. Something more as to its properties, real or assumed, we shall have occasion to examine as we turn ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... international law in any true sense. What really exists is the exclusive state—der geschlossene Staat—and in another sense than that of Fichte. This state is rigorously national: it excludes all foreign words from its vocabulary, and it would fain exclude all foreign articles from its shores in order to found a real 'national' economy such as List preached. Further, in the teaching of Treitschke this exclusive state is, 'as Machiavelli first ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... rules of grammar by rote. My father started me on the second Sanskrit reader at one bound, leaving me to learn the declensions as we went on. The advance I had made in Bengali[27] stood me in good stead. My father also encouraged me to try Sanskrit composition from the very outset. With the vocabulary acquired from my Sanskrit reader I built up grandiose compound words with a profuse sprinkling of sonorous 'm's and 'n's making altogether a most diabolical medley of the language of the gods. But my father ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... scholarships, and to end by becoming professors. Instead of simply reading away at interesting and beautiful books, and trying, to cover some ground, a great quantity of pedantic grammar was taught; time was wasted in trying to make the boys compose in both Latin and Greek, when they had no vocabulary, and no knowledge of the languages. It was like setting children of six and seven to write English in the style ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... thoughtful; Caleb's childlike faith and extensive vocabulary were alike puzzles to him. He did not understand that in homes—however simple—where the Bible is studied until it becomes as household words, the children are accustomed to a "well of English undefiled"; and so, unconsciously, mould their style upon and ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... to Borrow's letter of February 27th, the Committee resolved 'to authorise Mr. Borrow to print 250 copies of the Gospel of St. Luke, without the Vocabulary, in the Rummanee dialect, and to engage the services of a competent person to translate the Gospel of St. Luke by way of trial in the dialect of the Spanish Basque.'"—[Letters of George Borrow to the British and Foreign Bible Society, ...
— A Bibliography of the writings in Prose and Verse of George Henry Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... luncheon and dinner; cabin housekeeper and luggage man at the ports; and always a natty, stiffly starched jacket with a metal number; and "Yes, sir!" and "No, sir!" and "Thank you, sir!" his official vocabulary. Fine job ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... is one word in the extended vocabulary of barrack-room abuse that cannot pass without comment. You may call a man a thief and risk nothing. You may even call him a coward without finding more than a boot whiz past your ear, but you must not call a man ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... progress in grammar and orthography; but they wrote so miserably and slowly, that this consumed a great portion of valuable time. Observing that they were ignorant of the signification of a great number of French words, of constant use and recurrence, I made a selection from the vocabulary, and I set them to write down in little copy-books,[14] words which were in most frequent use; but the explanations contained in the dictionary were not enough, and I was obliged to rack my brain for new and brief definitions which they could understand, and to make them transcribe ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... trader on the river, in all his voyages. By way of giving me a specimen of its intelligence and feeling, its master set to and rated it soundly, calling it scamp, heathen, thief, and so forth, all through the copious Portuguese vocabulary of vituperation. The poor monkey, quietly seated on the ground, seemed to be in sore trouble at this display of anger. It began by looking earnestly at him, then it whined, and lastly rocked its body to and fro with emotion, ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... appeared objects which Urg would name, to have his sibilant uttering repeated by Garin. As the American later learned, the ray treatment he had undergone had quickened his mental powers, and in an incredibly short time he had a working vocabulary. ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... word ought to be rendered, not 'full of glory' but 'glorified.' Unspeakable. Still waters run deep. It is poor wealth that can be counted; it is shallow emotion that can be crammed into the narrow limits of any human vocabulary. Fathers and mothers, parents and children, husbands and wives, know that. And the depths of the joy that a believing soul has in Jesus Christ are not to be spoken. Perhaps it is better that it should not ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... lingo as he went along, calling the subtile serpent the most "amiable" of beasts, and ignoring gender, person, and number in an astonishing manner. He says "Lamb books of life," and calls the real old Southern aristocracy the gentiles! His vocabulary is an extensive one—I wish his knowledge of the art of cooking ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... a man having exactly his attainments and no others. In less than a month he was installed in a responsible position as their foreign correspondent and in receipt of a very respectable salary. The rapidity of phrasing in this movement was abnormal—prestissimo, in fact, if we indulge our musical vocabulary. But the instrumentation would have seemed less surprising to Sally had she known the lengths her mother had gone in the proffer of a substantial guarantee for Fenwick's personal honesty. This seeming rashness did not transpire at the time; had it done so, it might have appeared unintelligible—to ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... away with his fat friend into the stackyard—where they may take sweet counsel together in the "fause-house." Let him, with open mouth and grozet eyes, say what he chooses of "Pretty Poll," as she clings in her cage, by beak or claws, to stick or wire, and in her naughty vocabulary let him hear the impassioned eloquence of an Aspasia inspiring a Pericles. But, unless his crown itch for the Crutch, let him spare the linnet on the briery bush among the broom—the laverock on the dewy braird or in the ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... rather believes that he has a right to take part in her discoveries, to make use of her maxims, and to appropriate whatever else she may have to offer. But as philosophy, in order to become universal, must make use of her own vocabulary of unfamiliar combinations and difficult explanations, which are in harmony neither with the life nor with the momentary needs of men of the world, she is despised by those who cannot find the handle by which ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Bells—something of the grace and goblinry of which, Maclise's pencil shadowed forth in the lovely frontispiece to the little volume in the form in which it was first of all published—has exhausted the vocabulary of wonder in his elvish delineation of the Goblin Sight beheld in the old church-tower on New Year's Eve by the ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... pleasure." Consequently he declines to classify this form of oratory separately, reducing Aristotle's three kinds of oratory to two. It is valuable, to his mind, as the wet-nurse of the young orator, who enlarges his vocabulary and learns composition from its practice.[56] Aristotle includes it in rhetoric; for in its field of eulogy, panegyric, felicitation, and congratulation, it too uses the available means of persuasion to prove some person or thing ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... right enough, but they won't like you to draw their attention to it. Try and look gentle and forgiving—they'll feel quite as miserable as you could wish them to feel. The world has a beautiful frown of its own, and an endless vocabulary of cold words—wouldn't it do if the little sisters left ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... all the words are well defined, and sufficiently illustrated by examples; a table of contents and a complete index are also added, rendering reference to any word as easy as looking for it in a dictionary. The table of contents, indeed, will be found to serve most of the purposes of a vocabulary of synonyms: a glance at it will frequently give you all the words of similar signification to the particular one for which you may happen to require an equivalent. From the part of the book relating to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... whipping all over their narrow arena, when as if by common consent, they retreated to extreme opposite points, coiled as lightning strikes, and leapt at each other. Even Roldan gave a hoarse cry of surprise, and as for Adan, he fell into vocabulary: one serpent had darted straight down the throat of the other. For a moment there was a fearful lashing. The choking serpent, with protruding eyes, like small green coals, and jaws distended in agony, strove to dislodge his suffocating enemy, and the other humped his back and leapt backward in ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... a narrow lane shut in with high stone walls, and finally reach the foot of a long flight of stone steps and see the citadel looming above. It is Spain, and my passport is at the hotel. They are said to be very suspicious in Spain; to act first and investigate afterward. My whole vocabulary has already been employed at the custom-house, and consists of "Americano," "caramba," and "Si, Senor." It won the day at Irun. Will it win the ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... monotone of Mrs. Hoopington and the sharp staccato barking of the fox-terrier. Vladimir, who did not understand a tithe of what was being said, sat fondling a cigarette and repeating under his breath from time to time a vigorous English adjective which he had long ago taken affectionately into his vocabulary. His mind strayed back to the youth in the old Russian folk-tale who shot an enchanted bird with dramatic results. Meanwhile, the Major, roaming round the hall like an imprisoned cyclone, had caught sight of and joyfully pounced on the telephone apparatus, and lost no time in ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... usually are made, not found. Let us analyze that description a bit, for right here we come to the first of the four all-important factors of gardening—food. The others are cultivation, moisture and temperature. "Rich" in the gardener's vocabulary means full of plant food; more than that—and this is a point of vital importance—it means full of plant food ready to be used at once, all prepared and spread out on the garden table, or rather in it, where ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... imagine the scorn with which Troubridge would have received the potentate's reply had he given the same advice as Nelson. It is highly probable that had it been given on the quarterdeck of his ship, the King would have been treated to a vocabulary that would have impressed him with the necessity of scrambling quickly over the side. Nelson, it is stated, turned the French out of Naples, and they were subsequently overpowered by a plan put in ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... condition of the roadways, the vocabulary of blame had been exhausted long before I arrived. Two things, however, struck me in New York which I had not heard of by report: the greasiness of the streets, transforming every automobile into a skidding death-trap at the least sign of ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... highest and purest sense. This is just what our Lord Jesus Christ brought with him. If all the race of mankind had continued righteous, as man was when first brought into being, the word GRACE would never have had a place in heaven's vocabulary. But since man has fallen, fallen into sin, into death both corporeal and spiritual, into sickness and sorrow, into labor for his bread, into hunger and thirst, and anxieties and cares, God has ever pitied him. Instead of our Lord's saying, "God so loved the ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... had finished I gave him a shove which almost loosened his spinal column. He went reeling out across the sidewalk, and when he had recovered his breath and his balance he danced with displeasure and displayed a vocabulary that astonished me. However, ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... argue about with Ned. Except maybe his college-professor vocabulary. So I switched ...
— Arm of the Law • Harry Harrison
... always so quick to give things names—and so liberal about it that, to the embarrassment and undoing of the unhappy foreigner, they sometimes invent fifty names for one thing—have added so many words to the vocabulary since August 1914 that a glossary, and perhaps more than one, has been published to enshrine them. Without the assistance of this glossary it is almost impossible to understand some of the numerous novels ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... "a great success." Katherine's production contributed the element of comedy, while the vocabulary of adjectives was insufficient to express appreciation ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... baron from his niche, "you are only too happy. You are now in the precise position to define my old conception of the Lucky Dog. The Lucky Dog, you know, in my vocabulary, is he who, free from all domestic cares, saunters up and down his room in gown and slippers, drums on the window of a rainy afternoon, and, as he stirs his evening fire, snaps his fingers at the world, saying, 'I have no wife nor children, good or ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... yet so sordid and petty, so ugly, so humiliating—unredeemed by the slightest touch of dignity or even of pathos. It is a kind of anguish that poets have not commonly dealt with; its very words are not admitted into the vocabulary of poets—the details of it cannot be told in polite society at all. How, for instance, could any one expect to excite sympathy among lovers of good literature by telling how a family found their home alive with vermin, and of all the suffering ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... in their way. I might remark here that the epithet elegant is very sparingly used in modern criticism. It has probably gone out of fashion with the appearance of the Lake School, who, I apprehend, have no such phrase in their vocabulary. Mr. Rogers was, I think, almost the last poet to whom it was applied as a characteristic compliment. At present it would be considered as a sort of diminutive of the title of poet, like the terms pretty ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... back here in a month—Mrs. Guy Oleander! Even if she won't consent from pity for your state, she may to escape from that dreary Long Island farm. She did once before, you know, and may again. That is all I have to suggest, Guy. The rest is with yourself. In the vocabulary of great men, there is no ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... and mother have firmly refused to provide me with either a latch-key or a motor-bicycle. Owing to the lack of proper accommodation in my nursery my literary labours are carried on under the greatest difficulties and hampered by constant interruptions from my nurse, a vulgar woman with a limited vocabulary and no aspirates. I say nothing, though I might say much, of the jealousy of adult authors, the pusillanimity of unenterprising publishers, the senile indifference of Parliament. But I warn them that, unless the just claims of youth to economic ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... jurisprudence exclusively. They had been occupied in applying a peculiar set of principles to all combinations in which the circumstances of life are capable of being arranged. No foreign pursuit or taste called off their attention from this engrossing occupation, and for carrying it on they possessed a vocabulary as accurate as it was copious, a strict method of reasoning, a stock of general propositions on conduct more or less verified by experience, and a rigid moral philosophy. It was impossible that they ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... preserve ordinary decency. He interrupted the opening speech of the government prosecutor by noisy ejaculations, oaths, filthy expletives, and immodest and insulting gestures, and when rebuked by the judges showered down upon them all the abusive and abominable epithets of his extensive vocabulary. ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... Wilton, elbows on the table, stared straight in front of him, giving no sign of knowledge of the other's presence. Sloane fidgeted with the smelling-salts, emitting now and then long-drawn, tremulous sighs that were his own special vocabulary of ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... friendly to him; but Peter had the knowledge of how they would regard him when they knew the real truth, and this imagined contempt burned him like an acid. Sometimes there would be talk about spies and informers, and then these people would exhaust their vocabulary of abuse, and Peter, of course, would apply every word of it to himself and become wild with anger. He would long to answer back; he was waiting for the day when he might vindicate himself and his cause by smashing these Reds ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... when a poet expresses himself more powerfully than you express yourself, when a poet talks about feelings which are not usually mentioned in daily papers, when a poet uses words and images which lie outside your vocabulary and range of thought, then you had better take yourself in hand. You have to decide whether you will be on the side of the angels or on the side of the nincompoops. There is no surer sign of imperfect development than the impulse to snigger at what is unusual, nave, or exuberant. And if ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... word, term, vocable; name &c 564; phrase &c 566; root, etymon; derivative; part of speech &c (grammar) 567; ideophone^. dictionary, vocabulary, lexicon, glossary; index, concordance; thesaurus; gradus [Lat.], delectus [Lat.]. etymology, derivation; glossology^, terminology orismology^; paleology &c (philology) 560 [Obs.]. lexicography; glossographer &c (scholar) 492; lexicologist, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... readers with any further attempt at unraveling the opinions, illustrations, and rhetoric of Mr. John Harrington, Democrat and orator. The possession of an abundant vocabulary without any especial use for it in the shape of an idea will not revolutionize modern government, whatever may be the opinion of the individual so richly gifted; nor will any accomplished Democrat find a true key to success in ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... day, vocabulary, grammar, logic returned. They still iterated and reiterated their experiences, but with a coherence which gradually grew to consistence. In between, however, came sudden, sinister attacks ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... thought to make it a racy story, with the moral that the joke was now on Lusk; but that inner man had spoken and revealed the cow-puncher to him in a new and complicated light; hence he quieted the proposed lively cadence and vocabulary of his anecdote about the house of Lusk, but instead of narrating how Mrs. beat Mr. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and Mr. took his turn the odd days, thus getting one ahead of his lady, while the kid Lusk had outlined his ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... not referred to by Irving, who for some unexplained reason failed to meet the genial Scotsman at breakfast. Perhaps it is to his failure to do so that he owes the semi-respectful reference to himself in Carlyle's "Reminiscences." Lacking the stimulus to his vocabulary of personal acquaintance, Carlyle simply wrote: "Washington Irving was said to be in Paris, a kind of lion at that time, whose books I somewhat esteemed. One day the Emerson-Tennant people bragged that they had ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... that of one of the real monarchs of the day, was an event of transcendent importance, and was treated so. The vocabulary was ransacked to find adjectives glowing enough to describe his enterprise, foresight, sagacity and integrity. Much elaborated upon was the fiction that he had increased his fortune by honest, legitimate means—a fiction still ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... Jaalin. Two or three times she had changed masters, and finally had been purchased by an Egyptian officer, and brought down by him to Cairo. At his death, four years afterwards, she had been given her freedom, being now past fifty, and had taken service with Gregory Hilliard and his wife. Her vocabulary was a large one, and she was acquainted with most of the ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... Eighth Edition, illustrated by Forty Plates, and Selections from the Notes of Dr. Paxton, with additional Notes, original and selected, for this Edition, with a Vocabulary of Scientific Terms. Edited by an eminent ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... in any way of a normal child. I made a few ordinary remarks to him, and then I asked him if he knew his catechism. He replied that he did not know the word 'catechism.' I may mention that he speaks the dialect of the common people, but he has a much larger vocabulary. His mother has taught him to read, ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... peculiar embroidery stitch which she had learned from my grandmother, and which everybody admired. These two ladies had given her most of her grammatical instruction in Altrurian, but there was a bright little girl who had enlarged her vocabulary more than either, in helping her about her housework, the mother having lent her for the purpose. My mother said she was not ashamed to make blunders before a child, and the little witch had taken the greatest delight in telling her the names of things ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... O'Connor said. "But that's not his vocabulary, you see. What Charlie is doing is simply repeating the thoughts of those around him. He jumps from mind to mind, simply repeating whatever he receives." His face assumed the expression of a man remembering a bad taste in his mouth. "That's how we found him out, Mr. ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... 'Decameron' and the novels of Franco Sacchetti, we might imagine that the vocabulary of abuse directed at the monks and nuns was exhausted. But towards the time of the Reformation this abuse became still fiercer. To say nothing of Aretino, who in the 'Ragionamenti' uses conventual ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... little laugh—"who could pick up other people's ideas, and string them together as if they were her own. The girls weren't clever enough to know the real from the sham, but Mr Rawdon knew it at once. He saw how—how—" (she paused, groping in her extensive vocabulary for a word to express her meaning) "how meretricious it was! ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... immediate translation into words. The room was furnished as a study, and most artistically furnished, if you consider outlandish shapes in fumed oak artistic. There was nothing of the traditional prize-fighter about Barney Maguire, except his vocabulary and his lower jaw. I had seen over his house already, and it was fitted and decorated throughout by a high-art firm which exhibits just such a room as that which was the scene of our tragedietta. The person in the sequins lay glistening like a landed ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... the greater the sartorial obligation," retorted Hippopopolis, who, for a Greek and a guide, had, as will be seen, a vocabulary of most remarkable range. "Just as it happens that our King here, like H. R. H. the Prince of Wales, has to be provided with seven hundred and sixty-eight suits of clothes so as to be properly clad at the variety of functions he is required to grace, so does a god have to be provided with ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... can't. No, if I had a big book of synonyms to the words Grand and Glorious and used every one on 'em tryin' to describe that seen I couldn't begin to do justice to it, and so what is the use of tryin' with the Jonesville vocabulary. ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... into a confusing description of the Far East. He was clasping the pickets of the fence with his hands, and his eyes were fastened on hers. He lacked neither confidence nor vocabulary, and not for an instant did his tongue hesitate or his eyes wander, and yet in his manner there was nothing at which she could take offence. He appeared only amiably vain that he had seen much of the world, and anxious to impress that fact ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... appeared to pass their time on street corners arrayed like the lilies of the conservatory and busy with nail files and penknives. Thus displayed as a guarantee of good faith, they carried on an innocuous conversation in a 200-word vocabulary, to the casual observer as innocent and immaterial as that heard in clubs seven ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... was ever less of a time-server than Cleveland. "Expediency" was a word scarcely known to his vocabulary. Recognizing alike the dignity and responsibility of the great office, he was in the highest degree self-reliant. None the less he at all times availed himself of the wise counsel of his official advisers. In matters ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson |
