"Syntax" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... praise of Stevenson's style cannot be exhausted in a description of his use of individual words or his memory of individual phrases. His mastery of syntax, the orderly and emphatic arrangement of words in sentences, a branch of art so seldom mastered, was even greater. And here he could owe no great debt to his romantic predecessors in prose. Dumas, it is true, is a master ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... vigilance are submitted all matters relating to the spiritual part—has about eighteen or twenty pupils, counting seminarists and collegiates. In that institution are taught grammatical studies [minimos], syntax, philosophy, and moral theology, whose respective chairs are in charge of learned and industrious professors. The territory of the civil provinces which form this bishopric is divided into twenty-four outside districts for its better ecclesiastical ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... haw! but you can't help me at Logic, as you used at Syntax. Why, all the world knows a girl ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... gibberish, and stammering out such blundering distinctions, as the auditors perhaps may sometimes gape at, but seldom apprehend: and they take such a liberty in their speaking of Latin, that they scorn to stick at the exactness of syntax or concord; pretending it is below the majesty of a divine to talk like a pedagogue, and be tied to the slavish observance ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... old Daddy Gilpin? Slowest of men, even of English men; yet delicious in his slowness, as is the light of a sleepy eye in woman. I always supposed "Dr. Syntax" was written to make fun of him. I have a whole set of his works, and am very proud of it, with its gray paper, and open type, and long ff, and orange-juice landscapes. The Pere Gilpin had the kind of science I like in the study of Nature,—a little ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... different but the syntax and phonemes are nearly identical. I'll speak it perfectly in a week. It's just a question of memorizing two or three thousand new words. Incidentally, Joe wants to know why you're digging up his bottom land. He was all set to ...
— Blessed Are the Meek • G.C. Edmondson
... part of the Miscellany. The greater part of the Uncertain Authors are less ambitious, but also less irregular than Wyatt, while they fall far short of Surrey in every respect. Sometimes, as in the famous "I loath that I did love," both syntax and prosody hardly show the reform at all; they recall the ruder snatches of an earlier time. But, on the whole, the characteristics of these poets, both in matter and form, are sufficiently uniform and sufficiently interesting. Metrically, they show, on the one side, a ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Symphony simfonio. Symptom simptomo. Synagogue sinagogo. Syncope sveno. Syndicate sindikato. Synod sinodo. Synonym sinonimo, egalsenco. Synonymous sinonima, egalsenca. Synopsis resumo, sinopsiso. Syntax sintakso. Synthesis sintezo. Syphilis sifiliso. Syringe ensxprucigi. Syrup siropo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... discrimination; and Mrs. Piozzi brought to the task, a jargon long since become proverbial for its vulgarity, an utter incapacity of defining a single term in the language, and just as much Latin from a child's syntax as sufficed to expose the ignorance she so anxiously labours to conceal." ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... the omission of the pronoun subject, and the use of one or two constructions not unknown to French, but not admitted to use in the literary language, the syntax of the Provencal is identical with that of the French. The inversions of poetry may disguise this fact a little, but the lack of individuality in the sentence construction is obvious in prose. Translation of Provencal prose into French prose ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... his clothes are off, and he is snug in bed; not a wink can he sleep; that "fain" is domineering over him,—and he breaks out into what is as genuine passion and poetry, as anything from Sappho to Tennyson—abrupt, vivid, heedless of syntax. "Simmer's a pleasant time." Would any of our greatest geniuses, being limited to one word, have done better than take "pleasant?" and then the fine vagueness of "time!" "Flowers o' every color;" he gets a glimpse ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... "petrified metrical forms." With the success of the movement there was for a time a reign of license, when poet vied with poet in defying the time-honored rules, not only of versification, but also of vocabulary and syntax. But as in France, so in Spanish America, "decadence" has had its day, although traces of its passing are everywhere in evidence, and the best that was in ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... who came to New England in 1642, and is supposed to have settled at Foxden some years later, married Desire, daughter of the Reverend Jabez Pluck. Being a rigid grammarian,—a character sufficiently rare at that period,—he named his three sons Orthography, Syntax, and Prosody,—a proceeding that is understood to have offended the Reverend Jabez, who was naturally partial to the Scriptural nomenclature then in vogue. His scruples, I regret to say, were more than justified in the conduct of his grandchildren. Poor Orthography Prowllie ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... make a show of education; but I was disinclined to be overdone in syntax by a mere Indian, a member of a race to which we owe nothing except the land on which the United ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... go through dark doorways, giving on to yet darker cloisters, as freely as though the place was a bazaar. There are no aggressive educational appliances. The students sit on the ground, and their teachers instruct them, mostly by word of mouth, in grammar, syntax, logic; al-hisab, which is arithmetic; al-jab'r w'al muqabalah, which is algebra; at-tafsir, commentaries on the Koran, and last and most troublesome, al-ahadis, traditions, and yet more commentaries on the law ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... The syntax of the classic languages, which had been my weak point as a school-boy, now aroused the deepest interest, and I was grateful to Lepsius for having so earnestly insisted upon my pursuing philology. I soon felt ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... travelers, perhaps, were ever more dependent upon the people than ourselves. The Chinese language, the most primitive in the world, is, for this very reason perhaps, the hardest to learn. Its poverty of words reduces its grammar almost to a question of syntax and intonation. Many a time our expressions, by a wrong inflection, would convey a meaning different from the one intended. Even when told the difference, our ears could ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... fingers, All I've forgotten as well as what lingers 695 In this old brain of mine that's but ill able To give you even this poor version Of the speech I spoil, as it were, with stammering —More fault of those who had the hammering Of prosody into me and syntax, 700 And did it, not with hobnails but tin-tacks! But to return from this excursion— Just, do you mark, when the song was sweetest, The peace most deep and the charm completest, There came, shall I say, a snap— 705 And the charm vanished! And my sense returned, so strangely ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... Century had grown dilute. This adjuvant strain is found in the enthusiasm of Slang. Slowly its rhetorical power has won foothold in the language. It has won many a verb and substantive, it has conquered idiom and diction, and now it is strong enough to assault the very syntax of ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... gave rise to confusion when the old gender system decayed, and the form its gradually came into use, until, by the end of the seventeenth century, it was in general use. Milton, however, scarcely recognised it, its place in his involved syntax being taken by the relative pronouns and other connectives, or ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... Hazlitt opportunity to say:[367] "We should think the writer could not possibly read the manuscript after he has once written it, or overlook the press."[368] His habit of carrying two trains of thought on together was also responsible for slips in diction and syntax. An amanuensis working for him noticed this peculiarity, and Scott said in his Journal: "There must be two currents of ideas going on in my mind at the same time.... I always laugh when I hear people say, ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... remember anything when the time comes," said Heathcote. "I said my Latin Syntax over to Ashford, without a mistake, yesterday, and I've forgotten every ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... particular occasion for the rein of an old bridle (the truants of that busy day could have anticipated its application), walked down the Lawnmarket with Mr. Saddletree, each talking as he could get a word thrust in, the one on the laws of Scotland, the other on those of syntax, and neither listening to a word which his ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... using them, disturbs Nature. These disturbances have still the very same differences, though now and then called by new names. For names depend on custom, but the passions on Nature; and these being constant and those variable, this error has arisen. As, in the parts of a speech and the syntax of the words, some new sort of barbarism or solecism can suddenly arise; so the temperature of the body hath certain deviations and corruptions into which it may fall, those things which are against and hurtful to Nature being in some ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... of the latest books in the Old Testament. The criteria for determining the date are chiefly three. (1) Linguistic. Alike in its single words (e.g., preference for abstract nouns ending in uth) its syntax (e.g., the almost entire absence of waw conversive) and its general linguistic character, the book illustrates the latest development of the Hebrew language. There are not a few words which occur elsewhere only in Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther: there are some pure Aramaic words, ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... in prose superfluous and troublesome in verse. The art of grammar they truly possessed; the valuable fragments of Apollonius and Herodian were transfused into their lessons; and their treatises of syntax and etymology, though devoid of philosophic spirit, are still useful to the Greek student. In the shipwreck of the Byzantine libraries, each fugitive seized a fragment of treasure, a copy of some author, who without his industry might have perished: the transcripts were multiplied ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... the entertainment there came a wearisome dissertation on harmonic inflections, double emphasis, the echoing words, and the monotones. But, to borrow from Meg Dods, "Oh, what a style of language!" The elocutionist, evidently an untaught and grossly ignorant man, had not an idea of composition. Syntax, grammar, and good sense, were set at nought in every sentence; but then, on the other hand, the inflections were carefully maintained, and went rising and falling over the nonsense beneath, like the wave of some shallow bay over a bottom of ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... York, of whom it is possible to speak with certainty, was Ursyn Milner, who printed a Festum visitationis Beate Marie Virginis, without date, and a Latin syntax by Robert Whitinton, entitled Editio de concinnitate grammatices et constructione noviter impressa, with the date December 20th, 1516, and a woodcut that had belonged to ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... as Bossuet, whose use of qui and que is very striking. In the eighteenth century the language was acquiring greater freedom, but it is not until the nineteenth that it rids itself of much of the old syntax. ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... system of punctuation may be less defensible, but I have retained it because it may now and then be of use in determining a point of syntax. The absence of a comma, for example, after the word hearse in the 58th line of the Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, printed by Prof. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... root of the Anatolian peninsula, the Orthodox Greek population, submerged beneath the Turkish flood more than eight centuries ago, has retained little individuality except in its religion, and nothing of its native speech but a garbled vocabulary embedded in a Turkified syntax. Yet even this dwindling rear-guard has been overtaken just in time by the returning current of national life, bringing with it the Greek school, and with the school a community of outlook with Hellenism the world over. Whatever the fate of eastern Anatolia may be, the Greek element ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... delights. He rejoices to profess all the classics, and to learn none of them. On the other hand, by "Grammar" is now more commonly meant, as Johnson defines it, "the art of using words properly," and it "comprises four parts—Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody." Grammar, in this sense, is the scientific analysis of language, and to be conversant with it, as regards a particular language, is to be able to understand the meaning and force of that language when thrown into ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... and hideous a growth of hatred and sin, may be compressed into a sentence! And men judge of each other's lives through this summary medium. They epitomize the experience of their fellow-mortal, and pronounce judgment on him in neat syntax, and feel themselves wise and virtuous—conquerors over the temptations they define in well-selected predicates. Seven years of wretchedness glide glibly over the lips of the man who has never counted them out in moments of chill disappointment, of head and ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... people in the provinces did not differ materially from that spoken in Italy. It was the language of the Roman soldier, colonist, and trader, with common characteristics in the way of diction, form, phraseology, and syntax, dropping into some slight local peculiarities, but kept essentially a unit by the desire which each community felt to imitate its officials and ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... Tom, and I notice that the flowers of the white man's syntax have left his tongue. He is the original proposition in bear's claws and copper color. 'Me bring,' says he, and he lays the kid in his mother's arms. 'Run fifteen mile,' says John Tom—'Ugh! Catch white man. ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... poem off because it was too 'Miltonic', and it is easy to see what he meant. Not only does the treatment of the subject recall that of Paradise Lost, the council of the fallen gods bearing special resemblance to that of the fallen angels in Book II of Milton's epic, but in its style and syntax the influence of Milton is everywhere apparent. It is to be seen in the restraint and concentration of the language, which is in marked contrast to the wordiness of Keats's early work, as well as in the constant use of classical constructions,[247:1] Miltonic inversions[247:2] and repetitions,[247:3] ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... the syntax, and the genius of the language, must in this, as well as in several other modern European tongues, have been derived from the Celtic; it being well known, that the frequent use of articles, the distinction ...
— Account of the Romansh Language - In a Letter to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. • Joseph Planta, Esq. F. R. S.
... published some things—rhapsodic prose-poems, weak in syntax but strong in the quality miscalled imagination. Her pen name was George Bishop: following the example of the three Georges so dear to the believer in sexless literature—George Sand, George Eliot and George Egerton. She greatly ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... grammar, accidence, syntax, praxis, punctuation; parts of speech; jussive[obs3]; syllabication; inflection, case, declension, conjugation; us et norma loquendi[Lat]; Lindley Murray &c. (schoolbook) 542; correct style, philology &c. (language) 560. V. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... wisest of us must be beguiled in this way sometimes, and must think both better and worse of people than they deserve. Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don't know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning. Long dark eyelashes, now—what can be more exquisite? I find it impossible not to expect some depth of soul behind a deep grey ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... circumstances, except that instead of perambulate, the Rev. Amos wrote preambulate, and instead of 'if haply', 'if happily', the contingency indicated being the reverse of happy. Mr. Barton had not the gift of perfect accuracy in English orthography and syntax, which was unfortunate, as he was known not to be a Hebrew scholar, and not in the least suspected of being an accomplished Grecian. These lapses, in a man who had gone through the Eleusinian mysteries of a university education, surprised the young ladies of his parish ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... destroying intellectual development, and checking political progress. Ingenious speculations about the possible organisation of the working classes and grandiose views of the future of humanity are so much more interesting and agreeable than the rules of Latin syntax ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... fool you are, brother!" said Mr. Petulengro; "that very tail of his shows his breeding. No good bred horse ever yet carried a fine tail—'tis your scrubby-tailed horses that are your out-and-outers. Did you ever hear of Syntax, brother? That tail of his puts me in mind of Syntax. Well, I say nothing more, have your own way—all I wonder at is, that a horse like him was ever brought to such a fair of dog ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... Elmsley adopts; or understand [Greek: egemato] in an ironical sense, in the spirit of Martial's Uxori nubere nolo meae: in the latter case [Greek: hei t' egemato] should be read (not [Greek: hen t']), as being the proper syntax. ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... many of the characteristic White Slaves of the West and South Side "levees." One "Alice" I shall never, never forget. Beautiful aside from her dissipation, a high school graduate, grammar and syntax perfect, manner exquisite. "Alice," seduced at eighteen, was at the age of twenty-one away down the line in the West Side levee underworld. I used to talk many times with Alice as she sat in the back parlor of the "house" on Peoria street that gave her shelter, awaiting ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... other literature, he had likewise been taught nothing. But he knew the meaning of a few obsolete words in a few plays of Shakespeare. He had not learnt how to express himself orally in any language, but through hard drilling he was so genuinely erudite in accidence and syntax that he could parse and analyse with superb assurance the most magnificent sentences of Milton, Virgil, and Racine. This skill, together with an equal skill in utilising the elementary properties of numbers and geometrical figures, was the most ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... have, so to say, a grammar of their own, whose rules and syntax are more general than our own; if you attend carefully you will be surprised to find how exactly they follow certain analogies, very much mistaken if you like, but very regular; these forms are only objectionable ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... fearful insinuations about my grammar and my erudition. Now, as regards grammar, I hold that, in prose at any rate, correctness should always be subordinate to artistic effect and musical cadence; and any peculiarities of syntax that may occur in Dorian Gray are deliberately intended, and are introduced to show the value of the artistic theory in question. Your writer gives no instance of any such peculiarity. This I regret, because I do not think that ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... exclusiveness!—lying there, with none so poor to do him reverence! He was a type—and, by reason of his happy temperament, an exceedingly favourable type—of the 'gentleman,' shifting for himself under normal conditions of back-country life. Urbane address, faultless syntax, even that good part which shall not be taken away, namely, the calm consciousness of inherent superiority, are of little use here. And yet your Australian novelist finds no inconsistency in placing the bookish ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... therefore, of giving an exact transcript of the original poems, he set himself to soften down their harshness, to clear away their obscurity, to amplify, transpose, and mutilate according to his own ideas of syntax, taste, and rhetoric. On the Dantesque ruggedness of Michael Angelo he engrafted the prettiness of the seventeenth Petrarchisti; and where he thought the morality of the poems was questionable, especially in the case of those ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... This cannot be positively asserted. But while there is but little analogy in the sounds of the lexicography, so far as known, it is in this quarter of the globe, that we perceive resemblances in some words of the Shemitic group of languages, positive coincidences in the features of its syntax, and in its unwieldy personal and polysyllabical and aggregated forms; and the inquiry is one, which may be expected to produce auspicious results. On the assumption of their Asiatic origin, therefore, it is evident that the Indian ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... preoccupied with charges in bad French of yards of cottonade, "mouslin a dames," "jaconad," dozens of soap, pounds of tobacco, pairs of stockings, lace, etc.; but to our great pleasure each page corresponding closely, save in orthography and syntax, with a page of the new manuscript, and the page numbers of the old running higher than those of the new! Here was evidence which one could lay before a skeptical world that the transcriber had not expanded the work of the original memoirist. ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... and pesterest me with this sorry prattle." "What more wouldst thou have?" replied he. "Allah hath bounteously bestowed on thee a Barber who is an astrologer, one learned in alchemy and white magic;[FN612] syntax, grammar, and lexicology; the arts of logic, rhetoric and elocution; mathematics, arithmetic and algebra; astronomy, astromancy and geometry; theology, the Traditions of the Apostle and the Commentaries on the Koran. Furthermore, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the mere rudiments are understood. Even a lexicographer may nod, but it surely requires no intellectual power surpassing the achievement of women to refrain from regularly mis-spelling some of the commonest English words. The fact that there are niceties of syntax which have proved too much for great literary artists, does not make less culpable a wilful ignorance of the leading grammatical rules; yet the average woman will not undergo the brief drudgery of learning them. As for punctuation, though each man probably ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... Rowley used constantly the possessive pronominal form itts, instead of his; or the other fact that he used the termination en in the singular of the verb, was alone enough to stamp the poems as spurious. Tyrwhitt also showed that the syntax, diction, idioms, and stanza forms were modern; that if modern words were substituted throughout for the antique, and the spelling modernized, the verse would read like eighteenth-century work. "If ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... information on more subjects than came under the jurisdiction of his pedagogue's ferule. A benign Rosa Dartle might have been his godmother. He was for ever consulting encyclopaedias and books of reference. However badly he knew his Greek verbs or his Latin syntax he had a very shrewd and curious knowledge of the world when he left school at fifteen to enter the local branch of ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... descendants, as he supposed could furnish the information he desired, for anecdotes of General Reed; a part of my labours, hereafter to be entered upon, will be to narrate not a few of the rebuffs and rebukes this unfortunate Doctor Syntax in search of the biographical Pickenesque has experienced, and the minute fidelity with which my sketches shall be marked, will contribute, let me assure Mr. Reed, no less to his surprise than mortification, nay, I will establish that much of the ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... and fashionable society. We had imagined that destitute women turned novelists, as they turned governesses, because they had no other "ladylike" means of getting their bread. On this supposition, vacillating syntax, and improbable incident had a certain pathos for us, like the extremely supererogatory pincushions and ill-devised nightcaps that are offered for sale by a blind man. We felt the commodity to be a nuisance, but we were glad to think that the money went to relieve the necessitous, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... the stenographic report, was in excellent form, and committed a good deal of unforgivable syntax. He was somewhat apprehensive when he saw the bill of fare inscribed "Ye Olde Chop House," for he asserts that the use of the word "Ye" always involves extra overhead expense—and a quotation from Shakespeare on ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... they are talking English. And they speak two different dialects. The first, used with strangers, is 'blackman's English,'intelligible enough despite the liberties it takes with pronunciation, grammar, and syntax. The second is a kind of 'pidgin English,' spoken amongst themselves, like Bolognese or Venetians when they have some reason for not talking Italian. One of the Gospels was printed in it; I need hardly say with what effect. The first verse runs, 'Lo vo famili va Jesus Christus, pikien. (piccaninny) ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... on the following day a courier started for Washington with a letter from Jackson tendering the services of twenty-five hundred Tennesseeans and assuring the President, with better patriotism than syntax, that wherever it might please him to find a place of duty for these men he could depend upon them to stay "till they or the last ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... he lived precisely five years, all he did was done at that little age, and it comprised this: "He got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into Latin, and vice versa, construe and prove what he read, and did the government and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, ellipses, and many figures and tropes, and made a considerable progress in Comenius's ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... stop at the daring spirit of metaphor which connects the epithets "deaf and silent," with the apostrophized eye: or (if we are to refer it to the preceding word, "Philosopher"), the faulty and equivocal syntax of the passage; and without examining the propriety of making a "Master brood o'er a Slave," or "the Day" brood at all; we will merely ask, what does all this mean? In what sense is a child of that age a Philosopher? In what sense does he read "the eternal deep?" In what sense is ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the old method was one of repetition: it dealt immensely in committing Latin to memory. Ridiculous as was the system of giving to boys a Latin syntax in the Latin language, it at any rate did accustom them to the reiteration of a small number of words expressed in very simple sentences, and conveying knowledge of immediate utility.... While I nevertheless believe that at most schools ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... Blanchaud's Progressive French Idioms. Bouvet's Exercises in French Syntax and Composition. Bowen's First Scientific French Reader. Bruce's Dictes Franaises. Bruce's Grammaire Franaise. Bruce's Lectures Faciles. Capus's Pour Charmer nos Petits. Chapuzet and Daniels' Mes Premiers Pas en Franais. Clarke's Subjunctive ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... place in the language of these islands during the latter half of the eighteenth century; insomuch that the language of the Indian inhabitants consists entirely of Spanish words, but all the inflexions, the syntax, and the idiomatic manner of expression are Chilese, that is to say exactly corresponding to the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... that academy made in a real grip of the French language was miraculous; but the knowledge it gained in French grammar and syntax was deplorable. A certain mid-term examination—the paper being set by a neighbouring vicar—produced awful results. The phrase, "How do you do, dear?" which ought, by all the rules of Stratford-atte-Bowe, to be translated by Comment vous portez-vous, ma chere? was rendered ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... phrases and clauses | parsing, and quizzing teaching ability in | lest we be accused of | on historical and such a subject. | dishonesty in | mythological allusions. | preparation. The rest | Every "pony" user is | of the time is spent on| soon caught, because | questions of syntax, | he is asked so many | references, footnotes, | questions on each | and the identification | sentence. There is a | of the of the real and | distinct relief when | mythological characters| the hour is ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... with the vertebral column by a single occipital condyle" and so on. I also work spasmodically at Hindustani. I rather fancy my handwriting in the Perso-Arabic script. Arabic proper I am discouraged from by the perverse economy of its grammar and syntax. It needs must have two plurals, one for under ten and one for over, twenty-three conjugations, and yet be without the distinction of past and future. Which is worse even than the Hindustani alphabet with no vowels and four z's—so unnecessary, isn't it, ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... and Historical English Syntax. Investigation of special questions and writing of essays. Professor Price. Not given in 1898-9. ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... attention than another, nor is there any in which one may not at every step verify the connection or incoherence of the parts.[3221]—The procedure used in arranging a simple sentence also governs that of the period, the paragraph and the series of paragraphs; it forms the style as it forms the syntax. Each small edifice occupies a distinct position, and but one, in the great total edifice. As the discourse advances, each section must in turn file in, never before, never after, no parasitic member being allowed to intrude, and no regular member ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... have meant, not to turn from one language into another, but to explain the construction, or what is called by the Greek name syntax, much like what in regard to a single word is ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... conveyed little more matter than details of their future housekeeping, and his preparations for the same, with innumerable 'my dears' sprinkled in disconnectedly, to show the depth of his affection without the inconveniences of syntax. ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... days settled, when I prevailed upon my father to pay a visit to the village where I had been at school. Here we were received by the principal inhabitants, who entertained us in the church, where Mr. Syntax the schoolmaster (my tyrant being dead) pronounced a Latin oration in honour of our family. And none exerted themselves more than Strap's father and relations, who looked upon the honest valet as the first gentleman of their race, and honoured his benefactors ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... in some degree changed. But nothing can shake the truth of the statement that the Indo-Germanic languages constitute in themselves a family sprung from the same source, marked by the same characteristics, and differentiated from all other languages by formation, by vocabulary, and by syntax. The historical method was applied to language long before it reached biology. Nearly a quarter of a century before Charles Darwin was born, Sir William Jones had made the first suggestion of a comparative study of languages. Bopp's Comparative ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... could enable him to retain the rules of the Greek grammar or to handle the Latin language with the accuracy of a scholar. He soon gave up trying to do so. Instead of aspiring to the mastery of accidence and syntax, he aimed rather at securing immunity from the rod. At Magdalen School it was still actively in use; but there were certain rules about the number of offences which must be committed in a given time to call for its application. Green was clever enough to notice this, and to shape ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... copy a written model, in order to show it to their parents, because this article is most particularly examined, as everybody can tell what is or is not good writing. The boys knew all the rules of syntax ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... random acuteness (shown particularly in bold attempts to excise interpolations from the Gospels), but as devoid of the higher critical wisdom as was Bentley, whom he congenially criticised. To a reader of to-day, his arguments from Shakspere's diction and syntax are ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... agglutinative in their construction, the syntax being formed by adding prefixes principally and also suffixes to the root, but no infixes (that is to say, no mutable syllable incorporated into the middle of the root-word).[7] (2) The root excepting its terminal vowel is practically unchanging, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... It is a literature which by general admission is now the richest and most liberal in the world of living speech. English is a tongue less sonorous than Italian, less fine than French, less homely than German, but more expressive, more flexible, than these and all others. Its syntax imposes no burdens, its traditions are weighty only upon the vulgar and the bizarre. Without its literary history, American literature in general, and usually in particular, is not to be understood. That we have sprung from a Puritanical ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... percentage and interest, reduction; (3) elements of accounts and bookkeeping; (4) geography, history, and government—general questions, principally such as relate to the United States; (5) elements of English grammar, chiefly orthography and syntax; (6) writing and briefing letters; and ...
— Messages and Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes - A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • James D. Richardson
... The contrast between the styles of these prayers impressed Zulma very strongly. The former were such as she herself knew, complete, appropriate and pathetic in their very phraseology. The latter were fragmentary, rude, and sometimes incongruous in syntax, but they spoke the poetry of the heart, and their yearning fervour and indubiety made Zulma understand, as she listened to them through her tears, how it is that wayside statues of stone, and wooden figures of the Madonna in lofty niches, are said to hear and answer ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... laughter greeted this infraction of one of the most elementary rules of syntax, and several ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... rightfully imputed to the bent for poetry: that is only one effect of the common cause.—Jack, says his father, is indeed no scholar; nor could all the drubbings from his master ever bring him one step forward in his accidence or syntax: but I intend him for a merchant.—Allow the same indulgence to Tom.—Tom reads Virgil and Horace when he should be casting accounts; and but t'other day he pawned his great-coat for an edition of Shakespeare.—But Tom would have been as he is, though Virgil and Horace had never been born, though ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... pursued Heliet. "If I mistake not—to alter the figure—we have arrived at different points in our education. If one of us can but decline 'puer,' while the other is half through the syntax, is it any wonder if the same lesson be not given to us to learn? Dear Clarice, all God's children need keeping down. I have been kept down all these years by my physical sufferings. That is not appointed to ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... smiled superior at Bessie's sentiment and Bessie's syntax. "There is the railway, and Oxford is on the road. I intend always to ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... lingered there with some tenderness for Alpine piety. While he was near the high-altar some people came in at the west door; but he did not notice them, and was presently engaged in deciphering a curious old German epitaph on one of the mural tablets. At last he turned away, wondering whether its syntax or its theology was the more uncomfortable, and, to this infinite surprise, found himself confronted with the ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... sing a mad philosophy into life; and Rossetti, who painted poems and made poetry that is pictorial. Sculpture was the only art that had resisted this universal disintegration, this imbroglio of the arts. No sculptor before Rodin had dared to break the line, dared to shiver the syntax of stone. For sculpture is a static, not a dynamic art—is it not? Let us observe the rules, though we preserve the chill spirit of the cemetery. What Mallarme attempted to do with French poetry Rodin ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the brain must repeat themselves in secret hieroglyphics uttered by the flying footsteps. Even the inarticulate or brutal sounds of the globe must be all so many languages and ciphers that somewhere have their corresponding keys—have their own grammar and syntax; and thus the least things in the universe must be secret mirrors to the greatest. Palmistry has something of the same dark sublimity. All this, by rude efforts at explanation that mocked my feeble command of words, I communicated ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... being a representative or skilful interpreter. Horace Greeley said that when the rules of the English language got in his way, they did not stand a chance. We may be sure that if by violating the rules of syntax Horace Greeley sometimes added forcefulness to his editorials, he violated them deliberately and not in ignorance. Luminosity is not stumbled into. The richly savored and deliciously unlettered speech of Thomas Hardy's rustics was the creation of a master architect who had ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... and, with superb disregard for doctors and syntax alike, Quin put a firm arm around that slender yielding figure and swept her into ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... months, my pupil, without knowing any other Latin author, was able to read any part of the first book of the AEneid—to read it tolerably in measure, and to enjoy the poetry of it—and this not without a knowledge of the declensions and conjugations. As to the syntax, I made the sentences themselves teach him that. Now I know that, as an end, all this was of no great value; but as a beginning, it was invaluable, for it made and KEPT him hungry for more; whereas, in most modes of teaching, the beginnings are such that without ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient; that he, whose design includes whatever language can express, must often speak of what he does not understand; that a writer will sometimes be tarried by eagerness to the end, and sometimes faint with ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... seven years it continues, and ten months are devoted to it each year. The school takes and keeps the child three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon; it pours into these little heads all that is possible in such a length of time, all that they can hold and more too,—spelling, syntax, grammatical and logical analysis, rules of composition and of style, history, geography, arithmetic, geometry, drawing, notions of literature, politics, law, and finally a complete moral ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... is not necessarily a poet. So, too, there are poets who do not express their inspirations according to the rules of metre and syntax. ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... in our hearts that the French Academy is a foolish institution, designed and kept up for the encouragement of mediocrity, correct syntax, and the status quo, we still, also in our hearts, admire it and watch its mutations with the respect which we always give to foreign phenomena and usually withold from phenomena British. The last elected member is M. Francis Charmes. His sole ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... concerning the syntax and disposition of studies; that men may know in what order or ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... 'Distinction' was defined to be 'a diction which avoided homeliness.' Over against these there were two comprehensive vices, barbarism and solecism, the one being an offence against accidence, the other against syntax. ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... contrast to her husband's race, to have adopted non-resistance principles—a promise to abstain from fighting, provocative of many cuffs till it was well broken by a hinterschlag, applied to some blustering bully. Nor had he refuge in the sympathy of his teachers, "hide-bound pedants, who knew Syntax enough, and of the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty called Memory, which could be acted on through the muscular integument by appliance of birch rods." At Annan, however, he acquired a fair knowledge of Latin and French, the rudiments of algebra, the Greek alphabet, began ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... good English style; but it is certain he never did. He never had time, or rather he never took time, preferring invariably quantity to quality. What work of his has survived till to-day is read, not for its style, but in spite of its style. His syntax is loose and unscholarly; his vocabulary is copious, but often inaccurate; many of his sentences ramble on interminably, lacking unity, precision, and balance. Figures of speech he seldom abuses because ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... complexity in the construction of his sentences, that they may generally be reduced to a few of the first and simplest rules of syntax. On these he rings what changes he may, by putting the verb before its nominative or vocative case. Thus in the following verses ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... Off like bird, avi similis—(you observed The dative? Pretty i' the Mantuan!)—Anglice Off in three flea skips. Hactenus, so far, So good, tam bene. Bene, satis, male,— Where was I with my trope 'bout one in a quag? I did once hitch the Syntax into verse Verbum personale, a verb personal, Concordat—"ay", agrees old Fatchops—cum Nominativo, with its nominative, Genere, i' point of gender, numero, O' number, et persona, and person. Ut, Instance: ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... the present history can be considered only, like the Iliad, as a continuation of that series of cyclic poems, which have already been candidates for bestowing immortality upon, at the same time that they receive it from, his character and adventures. In this point of view I have violated no rule of syntax in beginning my composition with a conjunction; the full stop which closes the poem continued by me being, like the full stops at the end of the Iliad and Odyssey, a full stop ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Professor of Humanity in Marischal College, Aberdeen—a post which he held for eleven years. To this new labour he gave himself with all his heart, and was eminently successful. The Aberdeen students were remarkable for their accurate knowledge of the grammatical forms and syntax of Latin, acquired under the careful training of Dr Melvin; but their reading, both classical and general, was restricted, and they were wanting in literary impulses. Professor Blackie strove to supply both deficiencies. He took his students over ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... than he there saith of his lady and mistress: read but superstitious Coster and Gretser's Tract de Cruce, Laur. Arcturus Fanteus de Invoc. Sanct. Bellarmine, Delrio dis. mag. tom. 3. l. 6. quaest. 2. sect. 3. Greg. Tolosanus tom. 2. lib. 8. cap. 24. Syntax. Strozius Cicogna lib. 4. cap. 9. Tyreus, Hieronymus Mengus, and you shall find infinite examples of cures done in this kind, by holy waters, relics, crosses, exorcisms, amulets, images, consecrated beads, &c. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... grandfather, also William Beeston, to whom the satirical Elizabethan, Thomas Nash, dedicated in 1593, with good-humoured irony, one of his insolent libels on Gabriel Harvey, a scholar who had defamed the memory of a dead friend. Nash laughed at his patron's struggles with syntax in his efforts to write poetry, and at his indulgence in drink, which betrayed itself in his red nose. But, in spite of Nash's characteristic frankness, he greeted the first William Beeston as a boon companion who was generous in his entertainment ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... in Belhaven's oration which equals this in intensity, there is power and pathos, as well as Ciceronian syntax, in the period: "Hannibal, my lord, is at our gates; Hannibal is come within our gates; Hannibal is come the length of this table; he is at the foot of this throne; if we take not notice he'll seize upon these regalia, he'll take them as our spolia opima, and whip us ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... punctuation inconsistencies appear in the original of this text. Punctuation has been changed when required for correct syntax. Inconsistent spelling has been retained in direct speech for pronunciation purposes and in quoted written material, but has been changed ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... written at succeeding periods to replace it.[1] Such is the passion for versification, probably as an assistant to memory, that nearly every Singhalese work, ancient as well as modern, is composed in rhyme, and even the repulsive abstractions of Syntax have found an Alvarez and ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... dialect has by rights, its own compartment in that great impartial case of pigeon-holes where there is room for the rusty farthing as well as for the gold medal, and which is called literature. Slang, whether the public admit the fact or not has its syntax and its poetry. It is a language. Yes, by the deformity of certain terms, we recognize the fact that it was chewed by Mandrin, and by the splendor of certain metonymies, we feel that Villon ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... grammatical error for which in your day school-boys used to be whipped. You were not. It's important, because when lawyers get on to the interpretation of the law, loose syntax gives them their opportunity; they make fortunes out of the grammatical errors of Parliament. And, of course, it was a lawyer who drew ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... advisable), "whilst, in Greek, we have already commenced the thrilling account of the 'Anabasis' of Xenophon, that master of strategy! nor shall we, of course, neglect in either branch of study the syntax and construction of those two noble languages"—("noble languages," echoed the writers mechanically, contriving to insinuate a touch of irony ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... Spirit; Thought kindling itself at the fire of living Thought? How shall he give kindling, in whose own inward man there is no live coal, but all is burnt out to a dead grammatical cinder? The Hinterschlag Professors knew syntax enough; and of the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty called Memory, and could be acted on through the muscular ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... Theories of the Origin of Speech; Laws of Speech; Diction and Idiom; Syntax; Grammatical and Rhetorical Rules; Style; Figures; Poetic Speech; Prose Speech; ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... what happened at night. Sometimes Hugh started out of bed, and began to dress, when the elder boys went up with their light, only an hour after the younger ones. Sometimes he would begin saying his syntax in the middle of the night, fancying he was standing before Mr Carnaby; and once he walked in his sleep as far as the head of the stairs, and then suddenly woke, and could not make out where he was. Phil should have told Mr Tooke of these things; but Hugh was so very ...
— The Crofton Boys • Harriet Martineau
... known that no pregnant woman could look AEschylus in the face when the fit of inspiration was on him, without having cause to regret her indiscretion. But though delicacy might have dictated that this fact should be only barely hinted at, surely grammar need not have miscarried in the statement. The syntax of the passage will puzzle future commentators as much as some of his own corrupt choruses. "Euripides" promises well; but the expression, "Right in the classes," throws our intellect completely on its beam-ends; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... pronunciation in school will display the slightest heed to them among his companions on the ball-field. One of the most cogent arguments against the stereotyped teaching of Latin and Greek has been the serious doubt psychologists have held as to whether four years' training in Latin syntax will develop in the student general mental habits which will be applicable or useful outside ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... fraternity, to be not only astrologers, but conjurers too, if I do not produce a hundred instances in all their almanacks to convince any reasonable man that they do not so much as understand common grammar and syntax; that they are not able to spell any word out of the usual road, nor even in their prefaces write common sense or intelligible English. Then for their observations and predictions, they are such as will equally suit any age or country in the world. ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... unintelligible stupidity, have been considered as novelties, have by that means gained the admiration of Criticism and the praise of Fashion, until a more absurd novelty pushed them from their preferments and caused them to be as suddenly forgotten! The vulgar, tasteless jargon of "Dr. Syntax," with all the above-mentioned excellencies to excite public notice from the butterflies of fashion, soon found what it sought, though some of the plates or illustrations possess the disadvantageous merit of being good. Yet the letter-press doubly made up for all, for it was prose trebly prosified ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... discerning man, but hasty and severe, sent for the master of the grammar school, and inquired about Coleridge; from him he learnt that he was a dull and inapt scholar, and that he could not be made to repeat a single rule of syntax, although he would give a rule ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... Talmudic casuistry as soon as he could read; frequently he had not read the Bible or studied the rudiments of grammar. The Gaon insisted that every one should first master the twenty-four books of the Bible, their etymology, prosody, and syntax, then the six divisions of the Mishnah with the important commentaries and the suggested emendations, and finally the Talmud in general, without wasting much time on pilpul, which brings no practical result. "These few lines," says a writer, "contain a ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... item interesting to our friends who revel in syntax and prosody. Any machine or apparatus for lifting has been called a "jack" since the days of Shakespeare. The jack was the bearer of bundles, a lifter, a puller, a worker. Any coarse bit of mechanism was called a jack, and is yet. In most factories ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... influence on the new age greater than yours, more largely prepared the way of the newest music. You are indeed the good friend of all who dream of a new musical language, a new musical syntax and balance and structure, and set out to explore the vast, vague regions, the terra incognita of tone. For you are their ancestor. If, in its general, homophonic nature, your work belongs primarily to the romantic period, your conviction that the content conditions the form of ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... that he has always conceived and thought of the life of his hero and of the book as a river. So far as the book has a plan, that is its plan. It has no literary artifice, no "plot." The words of it hang together in defiance of syntax, just as the thoughts of it follow one on the other in defiance of every system of philosophy. Every phase of the book is pregnant with the next phase. It is as direct and simple as life itself, for life is simple when the truth of it is known, as it was known instinctively by Jean-Christophe. ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... this:—"The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ." The English supplement,—"the kingdoms," is justified and required, equally by the sense and the laws of syntax: and he is a deceiver, if a scholar, who insists upon any other, to supply the ellipsis. Indeed, the omission of similar supplements, has occasioned needless obscurity to the unlearned in other ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... tricks with her Gaelic in the way girls are fond of, piling up diminutives and repeating adjectives with a humorous scorn of syntax. While she is here the talk never stops in the kitchen. To-day she has been asking me many questions about Germany, for it seems one of her sisters married a German husband in America some years ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... a poetic diction distinct from that of prose; they turned away from simplicity of speech to ingenious periphrasis; they desired a select, aristocratic idiom for the service of verse; they recommended a special syntax in imitation of the Latin; for the elder forms of French poetry they would substitute reproductions or re-creations of classical forms. Rondeaux, ballades, virelais, chants royaux, chansons are to be cast aside as epiceries; and their ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... also; and when from the window of the first coach he watched the hearse bearing his wife swing round through the gates of the cemetery, he mentally recorded the resolution that on that day all uncertain syntax, all abuse and neglect of aspirates, and all Midland slang should be banished from his house for ever. He had loved his wife, but he frankly acknowledged to his soul that her death had been opportune; and as her coffin was lowered ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... pages of the book, and at odd times set some type.... The penmanship of the copy furnished was good, but the grammar, spelling and punctuation were done by John H. Gilbert, who was chief compositor in the office. I have heard him swear many a time at the syntax and orthography of Cowdery, and declare that he would not set another line of the type. There were no paragraphs, no punctuation and no capitals. All that was done in the printing office, and what a time there used to be in straightening ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... a whole, guilty of these charges? In the first place, the negro race of America is not ignorant. In the year 1833 John C. Calhoun, senator from South Carolina, is reported to have said that if he could find a single negro who understood the Greek syntax, he would believe the negro was human and would treat him as such. At that time it was a very safe test. God accepted the challenge in behalf of the negro race, and inspired his white sons and daughters both in the North and South to teach their brothers in black; and a few years ...
— Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days • Annie L. Burton
... barbarism of a language which one did not dare use in public documents, a pernicious custom for citizens whose lot was regulated in a language they did not understand. One was obliged then to cultivate French; but the language was neither noble nor regular. The syntax was left to caprice. The genius for conversation being turned to pleasantries, the language became very fertile in burlesque and naive expressions, and very sterile in noble and harmonious terms: from this it comes that ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire |
