"Grammatical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... very difficult sloka. I am not sure that I have understood it alright. Both Nilakantha and Arjuna Misra are silent. Instead of depending, however, on my own intelligence, I have consulted several friends who have read the Mahabharata thoroughly. The grammatical structure is easy. The only difficulty consists in the second half of the sloka. The meaning, however, I have given is consistent with the tenor ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... diligent self-educator, he gave ready encouragement to deserving youths in his employment, stimulating their talents and fostering their energies. During his own busy life, he contrived to save time to master French and Italian, of which he acquired an accurate and grammatical knowledge. His mind was largely stored with the results of a careful study of the best literature, and there were few subjects on which he had not formed for himself shrewd and accurate views. The two thousand workpeople in his employment regarded him almost as a father, and he carefully provided ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... medley can and must be changed; but a gesture is necessary, for speech is only a feeble echo of gesture. Only gesture can justify a value other than that indicated in this demonstration. This value is purely grammatical, but the gesture may give it a superlative idea, which we call additional value. The value of consonants may vary in the pronunciation according to their ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... had been made the subject of Patteson's exercise, and conversation helped to strengthen memory. After looking over a few of Patteson's German exercises, Mr. Schier found so little to correct, in the way of grammatical errors, that these studies were almost relinquished, and gave way to Arabic and Hebrew. Before we left Dresden, Patteson had read large portions of the Koran; and, with the aid of Hurwitz's Grammar and ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... added the delicate Slim Goodwin, and, partly to hide his grammatical error, but mostly to express his enthusiasm, he gave Joe a one-hundred-and-seventy-pound whack on the back that sent him sliding out of the chair and half ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... dead, and she had had so much wealth to dispense, for her father was rich beyond counting, and she controlled his household and helped to regulate his charities. She saw that he was not of the laboring classes, that he had known better days; his speech, if abrupt and cheerless, was grammatical. ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... done? you? or he? or I? This can only be inferred, for it is not stated. If a speaker wishes to make his personal allusion blind, he can always do so with the greatest ease and without the slightest degree of grammatical incorrectness. "Caught cold," "better ask," "honorably sorry," "feel hungry," and all the common sentences of daily life are entirely free from that personal definiteness which an Occidental language necessitates. We shall see later that the absence of the personal element from the wording ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... first, in this passage, the prelude, including verses 1, 2, and 3. We need not discuss the grammatical connection of these verses, nor the relation of verses 2 and 3 to the following section. However that be settled, the result, for our present purpose, is the same. Mark considers that John's mission is the beginning of the gospel. Here are two noteworthy ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... stages. Only half the work of the evolution of language is completed. There is, indeed, no tribe so undeveloped as to use the primitive forms of speech. The most savage of the races of mankind have made some progress in the art of combining words, gained some ideas of syntax and grammatical forms. Yet in certain instances the progress has been very slight, and in all we can see the living traces of the earlier method of speech ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... us could eat a morsel of the food they had there—did you ever hear of such a thing as having pie and preserves for breakfast?—and Oliver says it used to make him sick to see me in the midst of all of those people. They came from all over the country, and hardly anybody could speak a grammatical sentence. The man who sat next to me always said "he don't" and "I ain't feeling good to-day" and once even "I done it"—can you imagine such a thing? Every other word was "guess," and yet they had the impertinence to laugh at me when I said "reckon," which, I ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... a corrupt jargon of Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and Hindu words, first used by the Mongols, after the conquest, in their intercourse with the natives. Many of the principal languages of Asia are totally unconnected with the Sanscrit, both in words and grammatical structure; these are mostly of the great Tartar family, at the head of which there is good reason for placing the Chinese ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... a foreign accent, and something of a foreign idiom; but his ideas and feelings forced their way regardless of grammatical precision, and I thought his foreign accent agreeable. To an Englishman, what accent that conveys the praise of Shakspeare can fail to be agreeable? The most certain method by which a foreigner an introduce ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... stern and severe moralist as he was, was not a strict Calvinist. Anyone who takes the trouble to read 'The Manual of Religious Belief in a Dialogue between Father and Son, compiled by William Burness, Farmer, Mount Oliphant, and transcribed with Grammatical Corrections by John Murdoch, Teacher,' will see that the man was of too loving and kindly a nature to be strictly orthodox. What was rigid and unlovely to him in the Calvinism of the Scottish Church of that ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... me. That's not quite grammatical, I believe, but it's usual. Good-morning, Maxwell," he went on, holding out his hand. "I've come round early for two reasons. In the first place I want to be the first to congratulate you, and in the second place I want you to give me ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... illegitimate and licentious disregard of which, as recklessly manifested in "It is Never too Late to Mend," indicated a disposition to entirely subvert the established morals of the language. It is pleasant to see how unreservedly Mr. Reade has abandoned his functions as apostle of grammatical free-love. Of tricks of typography there are also fewer, although these yet remain in an excess which good taste can hardly sanction. We often find whole platoons of admiration-points stretching out in line, to give extraordinary emphasis ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... the contrary, be said that the divine doctrine, as queen and regent of the rest, better keeps her state apart, that she ought to be sovereign throughout, not subsidiary and suffragan, and that, peradventure, grammatical, rhetorical, logical examples may elsewhere be more suitably chosen, as also the material for the stage, games, and public entertainments, than from so sacred a matter; that divine reasons are considered with greater veneration and attention by themselves, and in their own proper style, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... anything after that, and as it really is a splendid opportunity, I made the bargain, and we began. I took four lessons, and then I stuck fast in a grammatical bog. The Professor was very patient with me, but it must have been torment to him, and now and then he'd look at me with such an expression of mild despair that it was a toss-up with me whether to laugh or cry. I tried both ways, and ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... be separate when used in regular grammatical relations and construction unless they are jointly applied in some ...
— Compound Words - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #36 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... these restorers of ancient texts, these disentanglers of grammatical subtleties, these divers among ancient chronicles and forgotten charters—what is it that they do but to multiply and revive useless knowledge, and to make it increasingly difficult for a man to arrive at a broad and philosophical view, or ever attack ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... "Min Hakk la-hu Asl an 'and-na huna Rajil," a thoroughly popular phrase. "Min Hakk" and "min Hakkan," where in the adverbial meaning of Hakkan its grammatical form as an accusative is so far forgotten that it allows itself to be governed by the preposition "min," is rendered by Bocthor "tout de bon," "serieusement." "Asl" root has here the meaning of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... character of being dumb, but I found it necessary to pretend to be deaf also, as they were constantly addressing me, and of course I could not understand a word they said. In the meantime, Bigg talked away for both of us; and although I very much doubt if his language was particularly grammatical, he seemed to get on famously with the savages; and acting on an idea which came into his head, he confirmed the notion they had adopted that I was a person ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... began to read Arabic' This seems easy in the telling, but in reality it was a long, a monotonous, an exhausting process. Think of the expenditure of hours and eyesight over barbarous alphabets and horrid grammatical details. One must needs have had a mind of leather to endure such philological and linguistic wear and tear. Priestley's mind not only cheerfully endured it but actually toughened under it. The man was never afraid of work. Take as an illustration his experience ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... of the translator becomes doubly hazardous in case of translating a European language into Japanese, or vice versa. Between any of the European languages and Japanese there is no visible kinship in word-form, significance, grammatical system, rhetorical arrangements. It may be said that the inspiration of the two languages is totally different. A want of similarity of customs, habits, traditions, national sentiments and traits makes the work of translation all the more difficult. A novel ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... whereof had obtained preeminence in grammar, which there had its origin and received its development,—this city, which gave to the world the master of this noble science, whose priority no one contests,—does not now possess a single preacher who pronounces the Sunday sermon according to grammatical rules! ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... than 490 books, but of these only two have come down to us, and one of them in a mutilated form: 1. De Re Rustica, a work on Agriculture, in three books, written when the author was 80 years old; 2. De Lingua Latina, a grammatical treatise which extended to 24 books, but six only have been preserved, and these are in a mutilated condition. The remains of this treatise are particularly valuable. They have preserved many terms and forms which would otherwise have been altogether ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... so to speak, all gloves. He must cover up her coarse speech, as he had covered up her coarse hands. He owed that to the gloves; it was the least he could do for them. So, whenever Mary Ann made a mistake, Lancelot corrected her. He found these grammatical dialogues not uninteresting, and a vent for his ill-humour against publishers to boot. Very often his verbal corrections sounded astonishingly like reprimands. Here, again, Mary Ann was forearmed by her feeling that she deserved them. She would have been proud had ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... his translation of Milton, with a dedication to Queen Victoria. His other works bear witness to the genuineness of his inspiration and piety, and the diligence of his study: they are poems, poetic translations from the Italian, religious essays, and grammatical treatises. ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... unremitting. Few men did so much and so well, at this period: for while he was framing the statutes by which his little community was to be governed, he did not fail to keep the presses of Wynkyn De Worde and Pynson pretty constantly at work, by publishing the grammatical treatises of Grocyn, Linacre, Stanbridge, Lilye, Holte, Whittington, and others—for the benefit, as well of the public, as of his own particular circle. I take it, his library must have been both choice and copious; for books now began to be multiplied ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... yourself," he added, pleadingly. "That word sathan, twice repeated, can it be anything else than Satan? Yehudas, what is that but Jews? And then homox, how very near to the Latin homo! I think, too, that I have even got a notion of some of the grammatical forms of the language. That termination of en, as in deluden, salubren, seems to me the sign of the present tense of the plural form of the verb. That other termination of tar, as in ebuntar, carantar, I suppose to be the sign of the infinitive. Depend upon it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... rub! If you said 'what,' you would be more grammatical. Norton swears that it was not human, and, indeed, from the scratches on his throat, I should be ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... frankness that rejected the idea of any concealment on her own part, so that we talked of ourselves, of our prospects, of the journey, of the weather, of each other—of everything but our host and hostess. It must be confessed that Miggles's conversation was never elegant, rarely grammatical, and that at times she employed expletives the use of which had generally been yielded to our sex. But they were delivered with such a lighting-up of teeth and eyes, and were usually followed by a laugh—a laugh peculiar to Miggles—so frank ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... The variation in the forms of the different parts of speech to show grammatical relation, is called INFLECTION. Though there is some inflection in English, grammatical relation is usually shown by ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... name may be either from the ancient English or the low Dutch; if the one, by tradition, if the other, from the use of it by medical men. Cancrum is an odd grammatical blunder; being, in reality, nothing but the accusative of Cancer, put instead of the nominative. The latter name was, as is well known, frequently applied by the older surgeons, in a vague manner, to any terrific and unmanageable ulcer; and, in particular, ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... trespassing on courtesy when I express a fear that a sentence like this exhibits the writer's entire want of acquaintance with the grammatical system employed by the great poet and the writers of his age. We must not judge Shakspeare's grammar by Cobbett or Murray, but by the vernacular language of his own times. It is perfectly well known that Shakspeare constantly uses the passive for the active participle, in the same ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 39. Saturday, July 27, 1850 • Various
... We are perfectly aware that Thiers has the right to speak thus, and that all combatants are not belligerents. But what! Is it as just as it is legal to argue the point so closely, when the lives of so many men are at stake; and is a small grammatical concession so serious a thing, that sooner than make it one should expose oneself to all the horrible feelings of remorse that the most rightful conqueror experiences at ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... tutor to the grandsons of Augustus (Sueton. Gramm. 17), was the author of Fasti, fragments of which have been discovered near Praeneste, and which were used by Ovid for his poem of that name. Of Verrius' grammatical works, the greatest was that entitled De verborum significatu (Gell. v. 17, 1), arranged alphabetically. It is lost, but we possess part of an abridgment (nine out of sixteen Books) made by Sex. Pompeius Festus before the third century A.D. The ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... too priggishly grammatical Lady Jane; "nowadays those sort of people dress like duchesses, and think themselves as good ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... Preston, as curate of St. Paul's, and in 1859 he was appointed incumbent of St. Luke's. Mr. Winlaw is a slender, carefully-organised, cute, sharp-eyed man; is inclined to be fastidious, punctillious, and cold; is a ready speaker; talks with grammatical accuracy and laboured precision; is rather wordy and unctuous; can draw out his sentences to a high pitch of solemnity, and tone them off in syllabic whispers; has an active physiognomical expression—can turn the muscles of his face in all directions; shakes his head considerably in ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... far as these are known, must be considered; no changes made in the text save through critical emendation, nor any translations offered not supported by accepted texts, nor any liberties be taken with grammatical constructions. By such plain tests as these Mrs. Eddy's use of the Scriptures will not bear examination. She violates all recognized canons of Biblical interpretation on ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... Meighen, who owned the rights of Othello and Merry Wives, were allowed to take shares. The editors of the Second Folio made only such alterations in the text of the First Folio as they thought necessary to make it more "correct." The vast majority of the changes are unimportant grammatical corrections, some of them obviously ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... a grammatical education, and been brought up as a peruke-maker from my earliest years—besides having seen a deal of high life, and the world in general, in carrying false curls, bandeaux, and other artificial head-gear paraphernalia, in bandboxes to boarding schools, and so on—a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... spirits being extreme, it was not surprising that they should feign this ignorance in order that they might be less pressed with questions; and that in their answers they had committed various solecisms and other grammatical faults in order to bring contempt upon themselves, so that out of this disdain the holy doctors might leave them in quiet. Their hatred is so inveterate that just before performing one of their miraculous feats, they suspended a rope from ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... a series of books to be purchased separately. Every page has a coloured cut of a very gay order. Cottages have yellow roofs and pink doors; and shopkeepers are dressed in crimson and orange. Some of the grammatical illustrations are droll: a heavy old fellow, cross-legged, with his hands folded on a stick is myself; Punch is an active verb; a wedding might have illustrated the conjunction; four in hand is a preposition. In ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 533, Saturday, February 11, 1832. • Various
... the psalms themselves, were worthy; but the versification was certainly the most villainous of all the many defects, though the sense was so confused that many portions were unintelligible save with the friendly aid of the prose version of the Bible; and the grammatical construction, especially in the use of pronouns, was also far from correct. Such amazing verses as these ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... the first pages of the book, there were grammatical lapses when Old Crow, apparently from earnestness of feeling, fell into colloquial speech. This was always when he got so absorbed in his subject that he lacked the patience to go back and rewrite according to rules he certainly knew but which had ceased ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... grave, and a spirit, bright as the seraphim that surround the throne of Omnipotence, ascended to the bosom of his God." There can be no doubt of the deep sincerity of this tribute, whatever question there may be of its grammatical construction and its rhetoric, and although the date is erroneous. The ratification of the Constitution of the United States by the Virginia Convention was on June 25, not on June 28. It is the misfortune of ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... Coplande; and about 1527 Giles du Guez or du Wes (anglicized Dewes), French teacher to the Lady Mary, afterwards Queen Mary, published his 'Introductorie for to lerne to rede, to pronounce and to speke French trewly.' In addition to grammatical rules and dialogues, it contains a select vocabulary English and French. In 1514, Mary Tudor, younger sister of Henry VIII, became the unwilling bride of Louis XII of France. To initiate the princess in ...
— The evolution of English lexicography • James Augustus Henry Murray
... of standing by itself as the predicate of a proposition; as when we say, Snow is white; and occasionally even as the subject, for we may say, White is an agreeable color. The adjective is often said to be so used by a grammatical ellipsis: Snow is white, instead of Snow is a white object; White is an agreeable color, instead of, A white color, or, The color white, is agreeable. The Greeks and Romans were allowed, by the rules of their language, to employ this ellipsis universally ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... abominable roads; the romantic aspect of scenery never engages their attention. It is even known that Julius Caesar, when he returned to his legions in Gaul, employed his time while crossing the Alps in writing his grammatical treatise 'De Analogia.'" ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... your Thesis put me in mind of my debt to you Why did you ——[60]. I will punish you for it, by telling you that your Latin wants correction[61]. In the beginning, Spei alterae, not to urge that it should be prima, is not grammatical: alterae should be alteri. In the next line you seem to use genus absolutely, for what we call family, that is, for illustrious extraction, I doubt without authority. Homines nullius originis, for Nullis orti ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... produced Virgil's Eclogues, Cicero's De Senectute and De Officiis, Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae and De disciplina scholarium, Aesop, a poem by Baptista Mantuanus, the 'Christian Virgil', Alan of Lille's Parabolae, Alexander, two grammatical treatises by Synthius and the Epistola mythologica ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... some few remarkable expressions, and an attempt at introducing fine words in their every-day conversation, the lower order of Yankees have a decided advantage over our English peasantry in the use of grammatical language: they speak better English than you will hear from persons of the same class in any part of England, Ireland, or Scotland; a fact that we should be unwilling, I suppose, to ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... the tinkle. I object to the poetic license which performs a Germanic divorce between subject and verb, so that instead of a complete thought which can be mastered before another is set before the brain, there is a twist in the grammatical sequence that requires a conscious effort of will to keep the original thread. The world is too busy to do this; reading must be a relaxation, not a study.... When poetry conforms in its mental tone to the spirit of the times; when it reflects the life and more or less the ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Freshman English that turned his hair gray," said Mrs. Bullfinch. "Having so many students come to college without knowing how to write a grammatical sentence was a ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson
... early investigators did not fathom all the niceties of the language, and the work of grammatical investigation has gone on continuously under the auspices of a constantly growing band of workers. Doubtless much still remains to be done; but the essential thing, from the present standpoint, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... boundaries of virtues and talents, vices and defects; and should explain the reason and origin of that distinction. But in order to excuse myself from this undertaking, which would, at last, prove only a grammatical enquiry, I shall subjoin the four following reflections, which shall contain all that I intend to ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... the one to whom it was addressed feel in as bad a humor as an author does when he finds a grammatical error in one of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the excellencies of the ancient fathers and school-men do all concenter in them: For his doctrine carries light, his reproofs are weighty, and his exhortations powerful, and though they are not in such an accurate or grammatical style as some may expect, yet that may be easily accounted for, if we consider, (1.) The great alteration and embellishment in the style of the English language since his time. And (2.) There can be no ground to doubt but they must be far inferior unto what they were when delivered ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... husbandry, even of music and design, so that the bodily activities of boys became relegated to the sphere of mere games and pastimes; but as books usurped more and more of the hours of boyhood, so the instructors of youth fell more and more into the fatally easy path of formal and grammatical treatment. The subject-matter of education was indeed literature, and the very noblest literatures, mainly those of Greece and Rome: but there was little of literary or humane interest about the study of it; its meaning and spirit ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... grammaticae of Priscian (Priscianus Caesariensis) formed the standard grammatical and philological textbook of the Middle Ages, its importance being fairly indicated by the fact that today there exist about a thousand manuscript ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... way, then, he accepted as axioms the social tenets held by his mother, or the business methods practised by his father. He believed that elderly men should speak precisely, and in grammatical, but colourless English. He believed also that people should, in society, conduct themselves according to the fashion-plate pattern designed by Mrs. de Laney. He believed these things, not because he was a fool, or shallow, or lacking in humour, or snobbish, ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... on account of the designation (of the Self as the agent) in actions. If not so, there would be change of grammatical expression. ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... grammar in a direct and simple manner, and within the smallest compass consistent with scholarly standards. While intended primarily for the secondary school, it has not neglected the needs of the college student, and aims to furnish such grammatical information as is ordinarily required in ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... purpose. My task is rather to point out the religious significance of the self-revelation of God contained in the name, and how it becomes the foundation of Israel's deliverance, existence, and prerogatives. Whatever opinions are adopted as to the correct form of the name and other grammatical and philological questions, there is no doubt that it mainly reveals God as self-existent and unchangeable. He draws His being from no external source, nor 'borrows leave to be.' Creatures are what they are made or grow to be; they are what they were not; they are what ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... orthographical? Had Harry found some wonderful instructor, such as exists in the present lucky times, and who would improve his writing in six lessons? My view of the case, after deliberately examining the two notes, is this: No. 1, in which there appears a trifling grammatical slip ("the kind, friends who I found and whom took me in"), must have been re-written from a rough copy which had probably undergone the supervision of a tutor or friend. The more artless composition, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... we tried to put the sheets together in their order, going by the grammatical sequence of the end of one page with the beginning of the next, but rarely could we obtain more than three or four of such consecutive pages. We were confused, too, by at least ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... religion. What we do want is humility, docility, reverence for God, and love for man. These are sown broadcast amongst human hearts. Now, these apply themselves to the sense of Scripture, not to its grammatical niceties. But if so, even that case shows indirectly how little could depend upon the mere verbal attire of the Bible, when the chief masters of verbal science were so ready to go astray—riding on the billows ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... letters have been translated, to the best of my ability, verbatim. In the not infrequent instances where I have been unable to extract any intelligible meaning, on grammatical principles, from the words of my author, I have put in the text the nearest approximation that I could discover to his meaning, and placed the unintelligible words in a note, hoping that my readers may be more fortunate in their interpretation than ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... may be. As Hunt said, "What do I care about the grammar if you've got something to say?" The important thing is to say something, and if you do really say something, and do really completely and precisely express it, as far as a painter is concerned it will be grammatical. If not to-day, the grammar will come round to it to-morrow. Henry Ward Beecher is reported to have answered to a criticism on grammatical slips in the heat of eloquence, "Young man, if the English language gets in the way of the expression of my thought, so much the worse for ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... which had just then taken possession of Mr. Browning's mind, and we have sometimes to struggle through a group of sentences out of which he has so laboured to squeeze every unnecessary word, that their grammatical connection is broken up, and they present a compact mass of meaning which without previous knowledge it is almost impossible to construe. We are also puzzled by an abridged, interjectional, way of carrying on the historical part of the narrative; by the author's habit of ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... prescription: or, if not quite so tragical as this, it is at least to sit voluntarily in the stocks with Sir Hudibras, and dare the world's contempt; while fashionable—or unfashionable idiots, who are scarcely capable of a grammatical answer to a dinner invitation, (those formidably confounded he's and him's!)—think themselves privileged to join some inane laugh against a clever, but not yet famous, author, because, forsooth, one character in ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... infrequency with which misspelled words appear in the composition work, letter writing, and other written work of the pupil. Similarly in language and grammar, it is not sufficient to instruct in rules of syntax. This is but the initial process. Grammatical rules function effectively only when they function automatically. So long as one must think and judge and reflect upon the form of one's expression, the expression is ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... training from physics and chemistry greater than that from geometry, and the training from a year's study of the laws and institutions of the Romans greater than that from equal study of their language. The grammatical studies which have been considered the chief depositories of disciplinary magic would be found in general inferior to scientific treatments of human nature as a whole. The superiority for discipline of pure overapplied science would ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive. If we dramatise its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror, and amusement, so magnificent is that spirit, so prolific, inexorable, grammatical, and dull. Like all animals and plants, the cosmos has its own way of doing things, not wholly rational nor ideally best, but patient, fatal, and fruitful. Great is this organism of mud and fire, terrible this vast, painful, glorious experiment. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... "etymology" as used in grammar must be carefully distinguished from "etymology" in the sense of word-analysis. Grammatical etymology treats solely of the grammatical changes in words, and does not concern itself with their derivation; historical etymology treats of the structure, composition, and history of words. Thus the relation ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... infer from their whole phenomena what their age is, and their structure, and their character. The Higher Criticism is a term pointing not to methods and results transcending ordinary intelligence, but to a study which aims "higher" than grammatical and textual questions considered as final. And thus of course the most earnest defender of the supernatural character of the Scriptures may be, and very often is, as diligent a "higher ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... many times in later years repeated the whole to me again—always in the same order, and with the same expressions and the same unvarying intonation—I will try to render it literally, and without omitting the innumerable grammatical errors into which he always strayed when speaking in Russian. Whether it was really the history of his life, or whether it was the mere product of his imagination—that is to say, some narrative which he had conceived during his lonely residence in our house, and had at last, from ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... personality of the interpreter. "L'art est un coin de Nature vu a travers un temperament." In literature, each writer has his own special style which may easily be recognized; but all follow the same grammatical rules. A correct style in singing consists in the careful observance of the principles of Technique; a perfect Diction; the appropriate Colouring of each sentiment expressed; attention to the musical and poetic Accents; judicious and effective Phrasing ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... ii. p. 931; Bell's Travels, vol. i. p. 247—254; and Gmelin, in the Hist. Generale des Voyages, tom. xviii. 283—329. They all remark the vulgar opinion that the holy sea grows angry and tempestuous if any one presumes to call it a lake. This grammatical nicety often excites a dispute between the absurd superstition of the mariners and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... composed myself to the work as well as I could. The book was one which, on the very face of it, required special attention. It was a folio in Dutch, printed in Amsterdam in 1650. Some one had made a literal translation, writing generally the English word under the Dutch, so that the grammatical differences between the two tongues made even the reading of the translation a difficult matter. One had to dodge backward and forward among the words. This was in addition to the difficulty of deciphering a strange handwriting ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... lack of knowledge is now removed, and with it all uncertainty disappears. The similarity of the two tongues, apparent enough in many of their words, is most strikingly shown, as might be expected, in their grammatical structure, and especially in the affixed pronouns, which in both languages play ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas
... two parts: one bears the name of "Kan Tsippor" ([Hebrew]), "The bird's nest," and treats of the Massorah of the Psalms, i.e., their divisions, accents, vowels, grammatical forms, and letters necessary for the preservation of the text; and the other, the name of "Gan Perakhim" ([Hebrew]), "The garden of flowers," containing poems, special prayers, family records, and descriptions of ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... that neither the grammatical nor popular sense of the term requires that construction. According to both, necessary often means no more than needful, requisite, incidental, useful, or conducive to. It is a common mode of expression to say that it is necessary for a government ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... tells a story of a grammatical difficulty which was to be settled by reference to a book in templo Pacis, in the forum of Vespasian; and again, when a particular book was wanted, "we hunted for it diligently," he says, "and, when we had found it in the temple of Peace, we ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... 25 for speed (the first row to finish scoring the maximum, and the others proportionately in the order of finishing), 25 for spelling, 25 for writing, and 25 for grammatical construction, capitals, and punctuation. The row wins which scores the highest number ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... or, if I obstinately persist in floundering, and am searching for the word as for a plank, he will jump in and rescue me. Under these circumstances, I am perfectly safe in talking French to him "Mais je ne vous attendais ce matin"—I've got an idea that this is something uncommonly grammatical—"a cause de votre lettre que je viens de recevoir"—this, I'll swear, is idiomatic—"ce matin. La voila!" I pride myself on "La," as representing my knowledge that "lettre," to which it refers, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 22, 1891 • Various
... of that testimony being couched in the vernacular language of the times, affords another point of interest to the English antiquary. Sometimes, indeed, we cannot help suspecting that the poem has undergone some verbal and grammatical alterations in (p. 329) the course of the four centuries which have elapsed since it was penned; but that circumstance does not affect ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... something ACTIVELY,—it is falling—to interfere with the bird, likely—and this indicates MOVEMENT, which has the effect of sliding it into the Accusative case and changing DEM Regen into DEN Regen." Having completed the grammatical horoscope of this matter, I answer up confidently and state in German that the bird is staying in the blacksmith shop "wegen (on account of) DEN Regen." Then the teacher lets me softly down with the remark that whenever the word "wegen" drops into a sentence, it ALWAYS throws that subject ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... evidence. We hasten to add that he could be convinced of error. He had regarded a sentence of Bacon's as a veiled confession that Bacon wrote 'Richard II.,' 'which, though it grew from me, went after about in others' names.' Mr. Spedding averred that Mr. Holmes's opinion rested on a grammatical misinterpretation, and Mr. Holmes accepted the correction. But 'nothing less than a miracle' could shake Mr. Holmes's belief in the common authorship of the masque (possibly Bacon's) and the 'Midsummer Night's Dream'—so he told Mr. Spedding. To ourselves nothing ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... Stress. The term accent may best be reserved for grammatical or dictionary accent—the greater emphasis placed according to standard usage upon one syllable of a word as compared with the others. Thus portion has an accent on the first syllable, material on the second, apprehension ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... unintelligible in the authorised translation of Psalm cxxvii. 2., "He giveth His beloved sleep?" It is a literal translation of three very plain words, of the simplest grammatical construction, made in accordance with all the ancient versions. A difficulty there does indeed exist in the passage, viz. in the commencing word [Hebrew: KN]; but this word, though capable of many intelligible meanings, does not enter into ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... the intellect. It should be legibly written, so that it may be read with comfort; but no more than that. Caligraphy betokens caution, and if it be not light in hand it is nothing. That it be fairly grammatical and not ill spelt the writer owes to his schoolmaster; but this should come of habit, not of care. Then let its page be soiled by no business; one touch of utility will ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... neither grammatical nor precise," snapped Judge Halloran. "You mean we must be moving." He linked arms with Tom and fell into step with him; he clung to that rigid arm, moreover, despite Tom's surly displeasure. Not until a friend stopped them ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... never learnt anything in the navy when I was a youngster, except a little rule-of-thumb mathematics. One picked up a sort of smattering of a language or two knocking about the world, but no grammatical knowledge, nothing scientific. If a boy doesn't get a method, he is beating to windward in a crank craft all his life. He hasn't got any regular place to stow away what he gets into his brains, and so it lies tumbling about in the hold, and he loses it, or it gets damaged ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... the most artistic skirts—always ball-room back and ballet front. Her grandchild was sitting on the floor yesterday, reading the Bible, when suddenly she looked up and said: "Grandma, there's a grammatical error in this Bible," and my landlady said: "Well, kill it, child, kill it!" She spends whole hours each day talking to her birds, which, she claims, save the expense of a piano. I told the grandchild to go out into the sunshine this morning and it would do her cold good. ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... language in conversation—is also a matter of importance, and while this can be acquired by a strict attention to grammatical rules, it can be greatly facilitated by the habit of writing down one's thoughts. In writing, strict regard is, or should be, paid to the correct use of language, and when a person, from constant writing, ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... companion was attracting more attention than her bonnet; and twitching her dress bade her sit down. Sal obeyed; but she had no opportunity that morning of deciding whether the sermon were grammatical or not, for she was constantly on the look out, and whenever she saw any one scrutinizing Mary or herself more closely than they ought, a shake of her fist and a horrid face warned them to desist. Twice during church time Mary thought, nay felt sure ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... "I have so far met with the success I hoped for, that I have acquired a great facility in reading the language, and treasured up a very great stock of words. What I have rather neglected is the grammatical construction of them, and especially the many various inflections of the verbs." To repair this defect he wisely resolved to bestow some time every morning on the perusal of the Greek Grammar of Port Royal. Thus we see that ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... are well marked members of the Maya linguistic stock, and differ from that language, as it is spoken in its purity in Yucatan, more in phonetic modifications than in grammatical structure or lexical roots. Such, however, is the fixedness of this linguistic family in its peculiarities, that a most competent student of the Cakchiquel has named the period of two thousand years as the shortest required to explain the difference ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton
... rejection of this bill a fortunate incident. Every State will certainly concede the power; and this will be a national confirmation of the grounds of appeal to them, and will settle for ever the meaning of this phrase, which, by a mere grammatical quibble, has countenanced the General Government in a claim of universal power. For in the phrase, 'to lay taxes, to pay the debts and provide for the general welfare,' it is a mere question of syntax, whether the two last ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... waters, and there they saw the tip of a great mountain coming up out of the sea, and the great serpents were coiled around the top and were sliding down the sides into the waters, and there was not a cracker there for John. And so, with scarcely a grammatical sentence and with most unfitting words, he went on for an hour with a discourse full of wildness and weirdness, and full of untruth, while the people looked on with amazement at the wonderful knowledge and power of the man. Twenty or thirty years ago you ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 1, March, 1898 • Various
... that language: and be so good to answer me in the same. Not that I am apprehensive of your forgetting to speak French: since it is probable that two-thirds of our daily prattle is in that language; and because, if you leave off writing French, you may perhaps neglect that grammatical purity, and accurate orthography, which, in other languages, you excel in; and really, even in French, it is better to write well than ill. However, as this is a language very proper for sprightly, gay subjects, I shall conform ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... had been classified and named; they had also been arranged according to the number and position of the separate wedges of which they consisted. Dictionaries had been compiled of Sumerian words and expressions, as well as lists of Semitic synonyms. Even grammars had been drawn up, in which the grammatical forms of the old language of Sumer were interpreted in Semitic Babylonian. There were reading-books filled with extracts from the standard literature of the country. Most of this was in Sumerian; but the Sumerian text was provided with a Semitic ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... least, written, in that country, belonged neither to the Aryan nor to the Semitic family, nor even to those African languages among which the ancient idiom of Egypt has sometimes been placed; it was, in an extreme degree, what we now call an agglutinative language. By its grammatical system and by some elements of its vocabulary it suggests a comparison with Finnish, ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... a quiet way, as between man and man; to talk over the past, to ask you how your conduct is and to inquire if I can do you any good in any way whatever. This is no time to speak pieces and ask in a grammatical way, 'To what you are indebted for this call.' My main object in coming up here was to take you by the hand and ask you how your memory is this spring? Judging from what I could hear, I was led to believe that it was a little ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... from my arduous labors to reply. The Colorado has been on the biggest boom I have seen since '39. In the pyrotechnical and not strictly grammatical language of the Statesman—"The cruel, devastating flood swept, on a dreadful holocaust of swollen, turbid waters, surging and dashing in mad fury which have never been equalled in human history. A pitiable sight was seen the morning ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... male or female—if virtues admit of grammatical distinctions, if virtues acknowledge the more worthy gender and the less worthy of the grammar, show me a virtue male or female that can long exist without truth. Even that emphatically termed the virtue of our sex, Helen, on which social happiness rests, society depends, ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... for that. Matthew Arnold had criticized General Grant's English, and Clemens immediately put down other things to rush to his hero's defense. He pointed out that in Arnold's criticism there were no less than "two grammatical crimes and more than several examples of very crude and slovenly ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... a good deal of talk about Mr. Austin's painting, and art in general. There were some half dozen pictures of the modern French school in this inner room, which helped to sustain the conversation. Mr. Granger talked very fair French, of a soundly grammatical order; and Clarissa's tongue ran almost as gaily as in her schoolgirl days at Belforet. She was going to see her brother—to see him shining in good society, and not in the pernicious "set" of which George Fairfax had spoken. The thought was rapture to her. They ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... who—for who the reward," said Philo Gubb, seeking a grammatical form that would sound right, "for information as to which five thousand dollars reward ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... teachers shook their heads. Their considerable experience of the world had never yet offered them a being so constituted. He listened more eagerly to the lowing of a herd of cows and to the twittering of the sparrows than to the best founded principles of grammatical science. Some of them thought him dull, others malicious. He passed from class to class with difficulty and solely by virtue of a marvellous faculty of guessing. At especially critical moments he was saved through the help and ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... really giving us the babble of Bedlam. If ladies and gentlemen who rant about freedom would try to emancipate themselves from the dominion of meaningless words, we should all fare better; but we find a large number of public personages using perfectly grammatical series of phrases without dreaming for a moment that their grave sentences are pure gibberish. A few simple questions addressed in the Socratic manner to certain lights of thought might do much good. For instance, we might ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... at the Crossing by high water, you silly," said the girl. "It was." This grammatical obscurity referred ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... My Class assembled in the chapel to choose theses-collectors, a valedictory orator, and poet. Jackson was chosen to deliver the Latin oration, and Cutler to deliver the poem. Ellis was almost unanimously chosen a collector of the grammatical theses. Prince was chosen metaphysical theses-collector, with considerable opposition. Lowell was chosen mathematical theses-collector, though not unanimously. Chamberlain was ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... eternal torment while gazing at earthly paradise. Janice became convinced that the powers of darkness no longer had singled her out as their particular prey, and in the peaceful isolation of the winter her woes, when she thought of them, underwent a change of grammatical tense which suggested that they had become ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... which I am sure I have your approbation. The learned languages have certainly a great advantage of us, in not being tied to the slavery of any rhyme; and were less constrained in the quantity of every syllable, which they might vary with spondees or dactyls, besides so many other helps of grammatical figures, for the lengthening or abbreviation of them, than the modern are in the close of that one syllable, which often confines, and more often corrupts, the sense of all the rest. But in this necessity of our rhymes, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... This is of course a grammatical irregularity—the verb should be 'is.' It is not the only instance of the same kind in ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... of their large promises in the Idler, by clothing those promises in language as magnificent as his own. It is much less easy to catch the subtle graces of Addison. At the conclusion of the Rambler, he boasts that "he has laboured to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... expressed may seem commonplace and the language hardly grammatical, yet this extract clearly reveals the darling ambition that was now haunting the heart of Burns. It was the same wish which he expressed better in rhyme at a later day in his Epistle to the Gude ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... neighbours do, the man who makes his living by doing what other people cannot do, must always be a marked figure. Look at modern society. It cannot toil nor spin; it can hardly put together ten words in a grammatical sequence. But it can clothe itself. The man of letters can both toil and write good English, but his taste in tailoring frequently leaves much to be desired. If he would put himself in the hands of Poole, ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... which composed the retinue of Mynyddawg, and that a hundred thousand, a large round figure, is chosen to denote the preponderance of the enemy's forces that were arrayed in opposition. This view seems more in unison with reason, as well as with the grammatical construction of the passage, ("emdaflawr" being a middle verb) than the supposition that the "milcant a thrychant" formed the total of ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... about the affinity of language among the Eskimo—some asserting that it is such as to allow mutual intercourse everywhere—but instances warrant us in concluding that considerable deviations exist in their vocabularies, if not in the grammatical construction. For instance, take two words that one hears oftener than any others: On the Alaska coast they say "na-koo-ruk," a word meaning "good," "all right," etc.; on the Siberian coast "mah-zink-ah," while a vocabulary collected during Lieutenant Schwatka's ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... of interest untouched) upon the manner in which Mrs. Fremont has treated her subject. It is novel, but not ineffective. Zagonyi tells much of the story in his own words; and we are sure that it loses nothing of vividness from his terse and vigorous, though not always strictly grammatical language. "Zagonyi's English," says some one who has ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... letter, and read it once more. He read it mechanically and as a piece of news that had brought evil tidings. Then, suddenly, another aspect of it struck him—an aspect to which the shock of its reception had until this tardy moment blinded him. The letter was perfectly grammatical and penned in a hand of copy-book roundness and evenness. The address, the body of the missive, and the signature, were all in one chirography. She would not have intrusted the writing of this letter ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... woman with a kindly face, a cousin of Captain Tiago, received the ladies. She spoke Spanish regardless of all the grammatical rules, and her courtesies consisted in offering to the Spanish ladies cigarettes and betel nut (neither of which they use) and in kissing the hands of the native women after the manner of the friars. Finally the poor old lady was completely exhausted, ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... knowing what she writes. The character is beautifully written, and the separate words are generally correct—such words as 'Christ,' 'God,' 'tears,' 'blood,' 'tempest,' 'sea,' 'thunder,' 'calm,' 'morning,' 'sun,' 'joy.' No grammatical construction hitherto, but a significant sort of grouping of the separate words, as if the meaning were struggling out into coherence. My idea is that she is being exercised in the language, in the character, in order to fuller expression hereafter. Well, you would ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... W. 1906, 277.) But even after his manly retraction Sprecher was not completely cured of the virus of Reformed subjectivism. Sprecher was among the first who, within the General Synod, declared that "inspiration does not make a book free of ... grammatical errors, rhetorical faults, and historical inaccuracies in minor and secondary matters." (L. ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... associates were soft-tongued; but here was something quite different from inoffensiveness of tone and diction. Godwin appreciated the differentiating cause. These young ladies behind him had been trained from the cradle to speak for the delight of fastidious ears; that they should be grammatical was not enough—they must excel in the art of conversational music. Of course there existed a world where only such speech was interchanged, and how inestimably happy those men to whom ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... in the first century after Christ; tutor of Tiberius, first in Rome, afterwards in Rhodes, from which town he called himself a Rhodian, and where Tiberius during his exile diligently attended his instruction. He was the author of various grammatical and other works, but his fame chiefly rested on his abilities as a teacher, in which capacity he seems to have had great influence (Pauly). He was the author of that famous description of Tiberius which is given by Suetonius (Tib. ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... ge, sun tisi charisi, tois ge dunamenois and the like; the pleonastic use of tanun, of os, of os eros eipein, of ekastote; and the periphrastic use of the preposition peri. Lastly, he observes the tendency to hyperbata or transpositions of words, and to rhythmical uniformity as well as grammatical irregularity in the structure of ...
— Laws • Plato
... far more rapid writer, and even grammatical faults are not infrequent in his papers. He explicitly declares that 'Elegance, purity, and correctness were not so much my purpose, as in any intelligible manner as I could to rally all those singularities of human ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... homeliest and simplest of men. On the bench he wore his baggy old alpaca coat as though it were a silken robe. And, as has been heretofore remarked, he had for his official and his private lives two different modes of speech. As His Honor, presiding, his language was invariably grammatical and precise and as carefully accented as might be expected of a man whose people never had very much use anyway for the consonant "r." As William Pitman Priest, Esq., citizen, taxpayer, and Confederate veteran he mishandled ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... my cheek, which I felt myself robbed of at the time by a wise legislator. But on the other hand I am really indebted for a good broad grin to P. . E. . , literary critic of Philadelphia, and sole proprietor of the English language in its grammatical and idiomatical purity; to P. . E. . , with the shiny straight hair and turned-down shirt-collar, who taketh all of us English men of letters to task in print, roundly and uncompromisingly, but told me, at the same time, that ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... present century nothing was known of the works of Fronto, except a grammatical treatise; but in 1815 Cardinal Mai published a number of letters and some short essays of Fronto, which he had discovered in a palimpsest at Milan. Other parts of the same MS. he found later in the ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... growth of a tree is the development of a language, as really and as strictly according to law. In savage lands like those of Africa the missionary finds the living germs of speech, arranges them for the first time in grammatical order, expresses them in written and printed form, using the simplest, most perfect, and most universal character of all—the Roman, and at one bound gives the most degraded of the dark peoples the possibility of the highest ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... Apostle coins an emphatic word which doubly expresses elevation, and in its grammatical form shows that it indicates a historical fact. That elevation was a thing once accomplished on this green earth; that is to say it came to pass in the fact of our Lord's ascension when from some fold ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... sleeves turned above her elbows, deftly handling her pastry—applying her rolling-pin and giving ornamental pinches, while she expounded with grammatical fervor what were the right views about the concord of verbs and pronouns with "nouns of multitude or signifying many," was a sight agreeably amusing. She was of the same curly-haired, square-faced type as Mary, but handsomer, with more delicacy of feature, a pale skin, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Annan, regardless of an unpopular grammatical convention. "I'm here with Ogilvy. May we ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... Bergier, Proudhon adopted the same point of view, that of Moses and of Biblical tradition. Two years later, in February, 1839, being already in possession of the Suard pension, he addressed to the Institute, as a competitor for the Volney prize, a memoir entitled: "Studies in Grammatical Classification and the Derivation of some French words." It was his first work, revised and presented in another form. Four memoirs only were sent to the Institute, none of which gained the prize. Two honorable mentions were granted, one ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Dorset folk is the ancient speech of Wessex. It is not an illiterate corruption but a true dialect with its own grammatical rules. But alas! fifty years of the council school and its immediate predecessor has done more to destroy this ancient form of English than ten centuries of intercourse between the ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... example in sterilizing his vocabulary whenever he crossed that boundary between the masculine and feminine element on the ranch, the bridge. Mrs. Kate did not approve of slang. Ford found himself carefully eliminating from his speech certain grammatical inaccuracies in her presence, and would not so much as split an infinitive if he remembered in time. It was trying, to be sure. Ford thanked God that he still retained a smattering of the rules he had reluctantly memorized in school, and that he was not married (at least, not ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... him with an ardent desire to propagate the knowledge of them; and to be propagated, he felt how necessary it was to render it less difficult. In this view he conceived the project of applying to the study of the idioms of Asia, a part of the grammatical notions we possess concerning the languages of Europe. It only appertains to those conversant with their relations of dissimilitude or conformity to appreciate the possibility of realizing this system. The author has, however, already received ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... original or oldest language upon earth, but that it is not even the oldest form in the Semitic group to which it belongs. To use the words of one of the most eminent modern authorities, "It is now generally recognised that in grammatical structure the Arabic preserves much more of the original forms than ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Evidence is frequently mis-stated and misrepresented in the courts, and this, owing to the great ignorance of numbers who are brought forward as witnesses, is a circumstance of no rare occurrence; the questions being taken down in writing, and, in the attempt to give them some grammatical connection, ideas being frequently perverted, and taken directly opposite to their original meaning, without any intention whatever to enter into a mis-statement. Now it must be sufficiently obvious ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... letter to the master intimating that he is doing something objectionable to some one of the many Unions that go to make a single implement of hardware. This letter has three features. It is signed with a real name. It is polite. It is grammatical. ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... violent effect to everything else. There are occasional detached images of great beauty and delicacy, but these were not beyond the powers of other writers then living. The circumstance which inclines us to reject the external evidence in favour of this play being Shakespeare's is, that the grammatical construction is constantly false and mixed up with vulgar abbreviations, a fault that never occurs in any of his genuine plays. A similar defect, and the halting measure of the verse are the chief objections to PERICLES OF ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... little things, he is noting differences all day long, because everything that he sees is different. Speech is different: the manner of enunciating the words is different; it is clearer, slower, more grammatical; among the better sort it is more careful; it is even academical. We English speak thickly, far back in the throat, the voice choked by beard and moustache, and we speak much more carelessly. Then the way of living at the hotels is different; ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... to enable them to keep their accounts. Beyond this it was often claimed that an education was of no value—that it only made rascals. I recollect a very zealous old man who preached for the German Baptists; he is now "across the waves." Once, in my presence, he disposed of a grammatical argument that was put against him, by saying, "It is the wisdom of the world, and it is sensual and devilish." It was common forty years ago for preachers to say, "I don't know what I shall say, but just as the Lord gives it to me I will hand it to you." As a general thing those men knew ...
— The Christian Foundation, May, 1880
... Quaker Village, with not a Quaker in it. Everywhere they are laying aside their peculiarities of costume, and in many instances, also, their peculiarities of speech, which are barbarous enough as they actually exist, though, if they would but speak with grammatical propriety, their forms of discourse are as commodious as venerable, and I would be content to see them generally adopted. I hope they will be slow to lay aside their better characteristics: their abhorrence of violence, and ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... woman, or widow, may pay taxes, but it would be outrageous for her to have a choice in the men who are to spend the money and then cry out for more. When married, ten years ago, her education was equal to her husband's, now she can not write a grammatical letter: her husband's mind has been enlarged by the influx of new ideas, and by contacts with the electric atmosphere of thought in the great world without; but denied as she has been the right of expressing her will by ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... that the Rowleian dialect was not English of the fifteenth century, nor of any century, but a grotesque jumble of archaic words of very different periods and dialects. The orthography and grammatical forms were such as occurred in no old English poet known to the student of literature. The fact that Rowley used constantly the possessive pronominal form itts, instead of his; or the other fact that he used ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... which descriptions occur; and this is the reason why, in order to understand such propositions, we need acquaintance with the constituents of the description, but do not need acquaintance with its denotation. The first result of analysis, when applied to propositions whose grammatical subject is "the so-and-so," is to substitute a variable as subject; i.e. we obtain a proposition of the form: "There is something which alone is so-and-so, and that something is such-and-such." The further analysis of propositions concerning "the so-and-so" ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... from the religious and legal formulae preserved to us by Varro, Cicero, Livy, and others, from proverbs and popular sayings. It would take us too far afield to analyze these documents here, but it may be observed that we notice in them, among other characteristics, an indifference to strict grammatical structure, not that subordination of clauses to a main clause which comes only from an appreciation of the logical relation of ideas to one another, but a co-ordination of clauses, the heaping up of synonymous words, a tendency to use the analytical rather than the synthetical ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... the ruined village of Shocoh (now made by a grammatical diminutive form of Arabic into Sh'weikeh) after picking, each of us his five smooth stones out of the brook, as memorials for ourselves, and for friends far away, endeavouring at the same time to form a mental picture of the scene that is so vividly narrated ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... most unexceptionable women in the neighborhood occasionally went to see the hounds throw off; but it happened that none of them were present this morning to abstain from following, while Mrs. Gadsby, with her doubtful antecedents, grammatical and otherwise, was not visible to make following seem unbecoming. Thus Gwendolen felt no check on the animal stimulus that came from the stir and tongue of the hounds, the pawing of the horses, the varying voices of men, the movement hither and thither of vivid color on ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... a few sentences from this story, which is commonly bound up with the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' like a woollen lining to a silken mantle, but is full of stately wisdom in processions of paragraphs which sound as if they ought to have a grammatical drum-major to march before their ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... you ain't—are not that sort." An hour back he could have kicked himself for the grammatical blunder; now he was wholly illuded; besides, she didn't seem to notice. "But as a ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... being generally 'unprotected' Englishwomen who may be seen in summer-time at the various railway stations—fighting their way to the front in the battle of the 'bagages,' and speaking French to the officials with a grammatical fervour, and energy, which is wonderful to contemplate[56]—taking their places on the top of a diligence, amongst fowls and cheeses, with the heroic self sacrifice that would be required to mount a barricade; in short, placing themselves continually ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... the host of those who make the great works of the poets odious by their analysis, impositions and laborious comments might learn this simple truth! It is not necessary that one should be able to define every word and give it its principal parts and its grammatical position in the sentence in order to understand and appreciate a fine poem. I know my learned professors have found greater riches in the Iliad than I shall ever find; but I am not avaricious. I am content that others should be wiser than I. But with all their wide ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... or at least domesticity, is certainly prior to war, although war may have noticeably strengthened it. Why, moreover, if such was the origin of the idea as well as of the thing, should they not have said, instead of serv-us, serv-atus, in conformity with grammatical deduction? To me the real etymology is revealed in the opposition of serv-are and serv-ire, the primitive theme of which is ser-o, in-sero, to join, to press,whence ser-ies, joint, continuity, ser-a, lock, sertir, insert, etc. All these words ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... 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 ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman |
