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Many were the choice examples of slang and of colloquialisms which I culled in the bathroom, sitting comfortably in my bath and communing with my neighbour in the next bath. I remember one morning making the acquaintance of an Australian who had recently recovered from a bad attack of trench feet. Four of the toes of one foot were missing, and the fifth looked far from sound.
Lou was on a local from Fall River that stopped at every pair of bars and even hesitated at the pigpens along the right of way. Getting aboard and getting off again at the innumerable little stations, were people whose like she had never before seen. And their speech, plentifully sprinkled with colloquialisms of a salt flavor, amused her, and sometimes puzzled her.
Even such archaisms as 'deemen' and 'thinken, such colloquialisms as the pronominal possessive, need not be too severely criticized.
He had a perfect command of the English language, but a wilful lapse into colloquialisms endeared him, he knew, to his rougher kind. There was no more popular man. He was blond and open-featured. He spoke in a loud yet always sympathetic voice, and in skilfully different fashions he called every man brother.
He liked her voice; it was clear without being harsh, and she seldom used smart colloquialisms. In fact, Carrie was not the girl one would expect to meet at a second-class store. "You are looking bright this afternoon," she remarked. "I feel bright," said Jim. "For one thing, I've got up, and then you have been here some time. You brace one. I felt that when I was very sick." Carrie laughed.
Canon Warburton, kindly searching on my behalf his brother Eliot's journals, tells me that he and Kinglake, meeting almost daily, lived in a cryptic world of jokes, confidences, colloquialisms, inexplicable to all but their two selves.
In a mining camp they told me to take such and such a "trail." The point is, that we did not talk that way where I came from. Of course, I hasten to say, we doubtless talked some other way just as peculiar. And if I could detect our colloquialisms I would write a lot about them but alas I can't. I was in the West two years before I noticed that a "trolley" is a "street car."
At first blush, it seems almost incredible that the writings of Mark Twain, with their occasional slang, their colloquialisms and their local peculiarities of dialect, should have borne translation so well into other languages, especially into German.
Day passed over day: I lived in that horrible lodging; I continued to labour at my novel; it seemed an impossible task defeat glared at me from every corner of that frouzy room. My English was so bad, so thin, stupid colloquialisms out of joint with French idiom. I learnt unusual words and stuck them up here and there; they did not mend the style.
Yet certainly there were deeps in his nature which the plummet of her tender woman's wit had never sounded; and certainly it sometimes happened that, even in his most domestic colloquialisms, my mother was in doubt whether he was the simple, straightforward person he was mostly taken for.
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