Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: April 30, 2025
American and English critics alike could not but protest against the solecism; for in poetry absolute precision of utterance is clearly indispensable. But in everyday speech a certain amount of colloquialism is inevitable. Let him whose own enunciation is chemically free from localism or slovenliness cast the first stone even at "mebbe" and "ruther."
If we have any worth-discerning faculty, we know when a man is handling certain subjects whether he knows what he is talking about; whether or not, to use an expressive colloquialism, "he has been there."
You might break our head at first, but by Heaven! we would break your back in the end!" But one need not write in the vernacular to be sincere and effective; personality may utter itself through different media, whether in different tongues or in distinct strata of the same tongue. Just now we have a bent toward colloquialism on paper; it was not the bent of Irving's day.
German newspapers, it is true, prove that the national unity so loudly acclaimed was no empty word; moreover, they show conclusively that grumblers and half-hearted enthusiasts were not lacking. It would probably be more correct to describe them as "sober-minded patriots." These elements had, however, to use a colloquialism, an "exceedingly rough time."
They belong to the weak-kneed brethren, and they followed Imâm Bakar because they feared him and To’ Râja. They found themselves, to use an emphatic colloquialism, between the Devil and the Deep Sea, nor had they sufficient originality between them to suggest a compromise.
Wit withheld him from utter lusciousness. Though he employed Corinthian cadences and diction, he kept continually checking them with the cynic twist of some deft colloquialism. To venture into his microcosm is to bid farewell to all that is simple and kindly; it is, however, to discover the terrible beauty that lurks behind corruption, malevolent though delirious.
I suppose 'right' expresses a corresponding image, and means that which is straight and direct; and I suppose that 'wrong' has something to do with 'wrung' that which has been forcibly diverted from a right line. We all know the conventional colloquialism about a man being 'straight, and such-and-such a thing being 'on the straight. All sin is a twisting of the man from his proper course.
This is, of course, intentionally cast in a homely style in contrast to the courtliness of the main plot; but Greene, as some of his later works attest, knew the value of strong racy English no less than his friend Nashe, who, in the preface he prefixed to this very work, pushed colloquialism and idiom to the verge of affectation and beyond.
"Courage, soldier," she said in the colloquialism her father often used, and she smiled at Crozier a great-hearted, helpful smile. "You are a brick of bricks, Kitty Tynan," he whispered, and smiled. "Here comes the Young Doctor," said Mrs. Tynan as the door opened unceremoniously. "Well, I have to make an excursion," Crozier said, "and I mayn't come back. If I don't, au revoir, Kitty."
We may notice that some of these words, such as banter and sham, are now quite good English, and most of the others have at least passed from the stage of slang into that of colloquialism. The word bamboozle is still almost slang, though perhaps more common than it was two hundred years ago, when Swift attacked it. Even now we do not know where it came from.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking