11/10/09
"I am not 'without sin' although 'I have cast many stones,' and one of those same 'stones' that was hurled at my friend and colleague of whom I told you, went 'into the mouth of hell,' was hurled at the doughboy by the boche but went a-sizzling back before it exploded and 'beaned' the boche in his own roost while he was singing 'Die Wacht am Rhein,' and believe me, I was 'beaned' in a similar manner."
Antony Joseph Caffrey (1921), "Pitfalls", Chapter XXX
"[A]ny sounds emitted in a microseceond during a period of chuckling (at a normal rate) hardly constitute chucklings themselves, but rather appear to stand to chuckling as a sultana might stand to a fruit-cake.''
Barry Taylor (1985), "Modes of Occurrence," page 71.
"The perverse are hard to be corrected, and the number of fools is infinite."
Ecclesiastes, 1:15, 1609/10 Douay-Rheims translation of Latin Vulgate source:
"Perversi difficile corriguntur et stultorurum infinitus est numerus," where "difficile" is adverbial in relation to the 3pl indicative passive "corriguntur."
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"He's in the gig, minding the prad."
Dickens, "Oliver Twist," Ch. 31
ku-onggo-ki ndee k[um]abusa-'i-keito
1Singular.Nominative-Future-Certain habitually wash.anus.of.[M.infix]-3Singular.Absolutive -1PluralInclusive.Dative
`I will certainly habitually wash our child's bottom for us.' (Mead and Youngman 2008, page 123)
This is a sentence of Tolaki, a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken in southeastern Sulawesi.
Reported in D. Mead and S. Youngman (2008), "Verb serialization in Tolaki," in Serial Verb Constructions in Austronesian and Papuan Languages, ed. G. Senft, Pacific Linguistics.
"I gently pulled her off the pelf, feaked and hooded her.''
OED, quoting from "Falconry in Valley Indus," 1852
"The making a fact the subject of thought raises it."
R.W.Emerson
"Shirley Bellow, 76, a retired teacher in Marysville, Mich., who voted for
Mr. Bush, said: 'I have confidence that the right person will be the
president and the president will be the right person. But I don't know who
that is going to be.'"
New York Times, 14 November 2000
"What what John is is is worthwhile."
F. Roger Higgins (1973), "The Pseudo-Cleft construction in English"