United States or Anguilla ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Some of these, as the constant use of 'Mistress' for 'Mrs., are interesting as archaisms, or words in use in the early days of the Colony, and which have never died out of use. Others are Yankeeisms or vulgarisms; others, again, such as the expression 'turning cuffums, i.e. summersets, from cuffums, a species of fish, seem to be of local origin."
Suppose, then, that the effect which has been again and again made to construct a universal language on a rational basis has at length succeeded, and that you have a language which has no uncertainty, no whims of idiom, no cumbrous forms, no fitful simmer of many-hued significance, no hoary Archaisms “familiar with forgotten years”—a patent deodorized and non-resonant language, which effects the purpose of communication as perfectly and rapidly as algebraic signs.
It was a labour of love, and it is full of records of singular survivals to our time of archaisms of all descriptions, culinary and gardening utensils not forgotten.
Samuel Butler's translation, which is lively and modern and much to be preferred to the heavy archaisms of the other fellows." Elizabeth gave a slight cough. The Squire looked at her sharply. 'Oh, you think that's not dignified? Well, have it as you like. Elizabeth altered the phrase to 'other translators. The Squire resumed.
The archaisms of old Greece are not better than such works; and as we can trace the onward course of those ancient masters of art from the rude outlines on the vases of Etruria, to the glorious works of Phidias and Praxiteles even so, if we wish to know the true course of the revival of modern art, must we trace it in the sculpture, wall-painting, and missal-drawing, of the middle ages, until we find it assume a more definite and better-regulated style in the fifteenth century; that period of the revival of classical tastes, and bright day-spring of art in Italy, from which we ourselves still drink inspiration as from the “well undefiled.”
He has hitherto been kept outside, in a sense, partly by his being a prominent statesman and party chief, partly by his incurable tone of mind with its Semitic and non-English ways, partly by his strange incapacity to acquire the nuances of pure literary English. No English writer of such literary genius slips so often into vulgarisms, solecisms, archaisms, and mere slip-shod gossip.
The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterises the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as subtle in colour.
Lyrics and episodic stories are interpolated, obsolete words and stylistic archaisms occur. In short, the novelette reads like an amalgamation of Novalis without his philosophy, Waekenroder without his suggestiveness, and Tieck without his constructive ability. The story entitled Leda is again typical of Loeben.
Even a poet of real inspiration, like Francis Thompson, may seek to carry, "hiddenly," as he would express it, beneath the cloak of his rapture, all sorts of absurd archaisms, awkwardly conventional inversions, hideous neologisms like false antiques, all mere counters.
For good or evil we have entered upon a new career. The old Cambridge, which some of us knew in our youth, with its solemn ecclesiasticism, its quaint archaisms, its fantastic anomalies, its fascinating picturesqueness, its dear old barbaric unintelligible odds and ends that met us at every turn in street and chapel and hall that old Cambridge is as dead as the Egypt of the Pharaohs.
Word Of The Day