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Use vernacular in a sentence

Definition of vernacular:

  • (noun) a characteristic language of a particular group (as among thieves);
  • (noun) the everyday speech of the people (as distinguished from literary language)
  • (adjective) being or characteristic of or appropriate to everyday language;

Sentence Examples:

Seeing it was the "Revival of Letters," however, which induced the revival of the cultivation of the vernacular Italian literature, surely it is not out of place to refer to it here.

Some idea of the wide area covered by the nomenclature of plants, as seen in the gradual evolution and descent of vernacular names, may be gathered even from a cursory survey of those most widely known in our own and other countries.

After a time, a disgruntled voice within snarled something in the vernacular.

At last, the German word has been put into the vernacular.

The writers, like Dawson, can probably talk vividly and forcibly, using strong nervous vernacular English, but the moment they take the pen all thought and individual character become swamped in a flood of turgid, commonplace jargon.

He was a great artist, making use of his scanty materials to the best effect; he had absolute control over the resources of his vernacular tongue, and not only unrivalled skill in composition, but tact and judgment.

The pupils were required to learn the Latin translation of his dialogues in the Anglo-Saxon vernacular.

The advertisements in vernacular languages that one meets with, circulated and posted up in all sorts of places, tell the same tale convincingly; for the advertiser knows his business, and will not angle where no fish rise.

Yelled the little Russian in true Cossack vernacular, as the poor old screw, thoroughly done up, made a desperate peck, ending in a slither that brought him to within a foot of the brink.

They talked for a moment in the vernacular, and the Frenchman explained again, "Volunteer!"

Burns goes the same way to work; scarcely a page of his but shows traces of some original in the Scottish vernacular school.

Writings in the Saxon vernacular like the sermons of Latimer, who was careful to use nothing not familiar to the common people, did much to help the scholars to save our prose from the extravagances which they dreaded.

The desideratum still exists of an increased percentage of pupils leaving our schools for the deaf, possessing a facility of expression in English vernacular.

No literature in her vernacular, save a few Runic inscriptions, has survived.

With a view to further improvements in the science, he has also resorted to the original sources of grammatical knowledge, and has not only critically considered what he has seen or heard of our vernacular tongue, but has sought with some diligence the analogies of speech in the structure of several other languages.

Was the general cry, in the vernacular Irish, and a universal scamper commenced.

And lastly, he is a man of distinguished literary ability, wielding the language of his adopted country with an ease and grace which hardly leave a suspicion that he was not writing his vernacular tongue.

The same volume also contained a collection of eclogues in the vernacular by various authors, none of which have any particular interest beyond what attaches to them as practically heading the list of Italian pastorals.

When Perkins had been in the town three years, the anecdotes illustrating his shiftlessness multiplied, and his name was a synonym for that trait of character known in the vernacular as "no-'count."

The daughters were glad to have a chance to try their English, and I was glad for the moment to slip out of the foreign bond and disport myself for their benefit in my vernacular, but the Professor needed no practice.

They chatter together ceaselessly and rapidly like starlings, with curious inflections in their English speech, and phrases snatched up from the vernacular.

This statement upon hearsay, however, does little more than confirm the definite assertion of Boccaccio that Dante "trained many scholars," not in civil law, but in "poetry, especially in the vernacular."

The retouching, although satisfying grammar here and there, might have dimmed the vernacular value of his speech.

No man of his generation has quite such a grip on the vernacular: his speech rejoices to disport itself in root flavors; the only younger writer who equals him in this relish for reality of expression is Kipling.

Proverbial axioms flourish copiously in the idiomatic ground and vernacular climate of unlearned, undisciplined, unreflective minds, as thistles on the highway where every ass may gather them.

A vague and insignificant similarity of themes is a fault of the work and of the style, ever in high disdain of vernacular harmony, refreshing to be sure, in its saucy audacity, and anon enchanting with a ring of new, fiery chord.

A limited number of Japanese youths might at the same time be educated in our own vernacular, and mutual benefits would result to both Governments.

In point of fact, he was a quiet, inoffensive, amiable man, who gave his mind to Sanskrit for work and to entomology for play, and did not trouble himself about his own portrait as drawn in the local vernacular.

To this he would reply, that if the genuine language were preserved, it would be utterly unintelligible to modern Englishmen, and therefore he has thought it preferable to translate into the vernacular of today.

We cannot present the Anglo-Saxon or Norman French they really used, and to load the work with words culled from Chaucer would be simply an anachronism; hence he has freely translated the speech of his characters into the modern vernacular.

The message the coolie was bringing was misunderstood by the conceited assistant, and as a result of having just this smattering of the vernacular, he ran his firm in for a loss of fifty thousand dollars.

They become deeply interested in my tour of the world, which the scholarly pedagogue has learned of through the medium of the vernacular press.

In the meantime she was instructing a class of the older girls in the orphanage in physiology and hygiene, both in English and the vernacular, with the hope that some time they might have regular medical training.

Indeed, I cannot recognize in our Romano-British remains the contrast alleged by this writer 'between an exotic culture of a higher order and a vernacular culture of a primitive kind'.

Dutch cheese American vernacular for cottage or pot cheese.

In the vernacular the name of the great viceroy and the word for circle have the same sound; the gesture signified that the dying monarch's last wish was revenge on the man who had failed him ten years before.

The Midrashim, for the most part, originated in a praiseworthy desire to familiarize the people with Holy Writ, which had, in consequence of changes in the vernacular, become to them, in the course of time, almost a dead letter.

The Scandinavians and those whose vernacular is the Low German easily substitute English for their mother tongue.

The sense of a Latin or Greek word, he said, is better established, more surely fixed, more definite, less liable to capricious peculiarities of convention, than the vernacular words which the whim or ignorance of the lexicographer may choose.

What the Boers still speak is a vernacular or dialect so far removed from High Dutch as to be unintelligible to the uninitiated Hollander.

The feeling thus existed some twenty years ago that English would become general, and ultimately oust both Dutch and the vernacular.

Poetry in the vernacular Dutch and pamphlets teeming with like burdens and calumnies also did their share in inspiring race hatred.

Nor during this period were translations made of the classics or commentaries, into the Japanese vernacular.

Billy was always coming to me with pleasant news, told in his slangy New-York boy vernacular.

Dr Murray further calls attention to the Early Scottish Laws, of which the vernacular translations partly belong to the fourteenth century.

When she spoke again it was slowly and distinctly, her words quite free from the blur of the barroom and street vernacular.

After the Conquest the indifference and contempt with which the conquerors regarded everything Saxon must have been responsible for the destruction of nearly every manuscript written in the vernacular.

Most of the German soldiers garrisoned here have picked up a few useful words of French; all of them can, and do, call for wine, white or red, in the vernacular.

To be sure, Deacon Mason and his wife often dropped into the vernacular, but the Deacon was a very dignified old gentleman and his wife was not a great talker.

After long and fierce controversies on the rival merits of the vernaculars and of English as the more suitable vehicle for the expansion of education, Macaulay's famous Minute of March 7, 1835, determined a revolution of which only very few at the time foresaw, however faintly, the ultimate consequences.

Kruger's reply in the vernacular is unprintable; but the polite equivalent is, 'Ugh!

We can hardly doubt that vernacular hymns existed, but they did not receive the imprimatur of any teacher, and have not survived.

Now, prayers, in the vernacular tongue and suited to the occasion, were offered with simplicity and earnestness; then, petitions, long since antiquated, were muttered in a dead language.

Latin served Descartes and Spinoza, men of science again; and it was not until the nineteenth century that the invading vernaculars finally ousted the language of the learned which had once been in universal use.

I seldom trouble the public with a Greek or Latin name, but on this occasion I trust I may be pardoned for not indulging in all the ingenuous bluntness of the vernacular.

The former, though in a somewhat fluid condition, were sufficiently sacred to be kept unchanged in the original Indian language, the latter were translated into the kindred but still distinct vernacular of the island.

The Doctor spoke with the pure English and high northern voice of an old school of professional men, whose tongue, save in telling a story, knew not the vernacular, and yet in its pitch and accent inevitably betrayed their birthplace.

All the vernacular literatures have been influenced by the Latin, but of Anglo-Saxon literature alone can it be said that it has been subjected to no other influence.

French, German, Italian, and other continental tongues, seem to have attained their limits as vernaculars.

In referring to the qualities which are usually found in connection with the prevalence of English as a vernacular, we are led to anticipate prodigious strides in the popularizing of literature during the next twenty years.

It is only in the more measured and sober gait proper to oratorio that we can listen to it in the vernacular without thought of incongruity.

It may have been, moreover, that he feared that his wife was home, in which case she might have lost her head, and, dashing out with a scream, "blown the whole gaff," as they say in the vernacular.

The folk who imagine that the hospital orderly enjoys a "cushy job" (to use the appropriate vernacular) seldom make sufficient allowance for this painful aspect of it.

Eckhart was the first man who thought consecutively in the German vernacular, and who made this philosophically still virginal language a medium for expressing profound thought.

"Geraldine," said Kathleen, who very seldom relapsed into the vernacular, "this brother of yours desires to perform some startling stunt in entomology and be awarded Carnegie medals."

He had a true German fondness for old ways and settled customs, and to the end of his days spoke only his own vernacular.

Miller perceived that the time had now come for her husband's wealth to be recognized and appreciated; or, as he himself expressed it, in vernacular that was strictly to the point if inelegant in diction, the time was come for him "to cut a splash."

He himself would have been the last to resent being placed in a national tradition, but, on the contrary, would have been proud to be regarded as the last and greatest of Scottish vernacular poets.

Apart from the respects in which Burns is the inheritor and perfecter of the vernacular traditions, and apart from his contact, active or passive, with the English poets of his time, there is much in his poetry which is thoroughly his own.

Occasional members even of the aristocracy prided themselves on their command of the vernacular; and among the country folk there were few who could not make a brave attempt at English when they spoke with the laird or the minister.

He spent a minute putting his ideas in order, and began very slowly, translating in his mind from the vernacular to English, as many Anglo-Indian children do.

By degrees Greek became the language of the upper classes in all the Bulgarian towns, the Bulgarian language was written in Greek characters, and the illiterate peasants, though speaking the vernacular, called themselves Greeks.

Brooks has brought to the decanting of these seething passages into tolerable vernacular limits.

It is a curious instance of "survival" that this was always shouted in Latin, though Greek was the vernacular tongue of the vast majority of the inhabitants of Constantinople.

This I quoted to the astounded foreigner in the vernacular, and this it was that metamorphosed his mere perfection of civility into sudden warmth, and, in fact, procured me the invitation in question.

The circumstance, also, of that testimony being couched in the vernacular language of the times, affords another point of interest to the English antiquary.

As, on the Oriental side, Carey chose for his weapon the vernacular, on the other he drew from Western sources the principles and the thoughts which he clothed in a Bengali dress.

These tribes have all abandoned their own languages and adopted the local Aryan vernaculars.

None of them have adopted a Dravidian language, but all speak corrupt forms of the ancient Aryan vernaculars derived from Sanskrit.

Luther spoke and wrote his own vernacular German.

The basis is an archaic form of German, on which are grafted many words of Hebrew origin, and words from the vernacular of the country.

Either language can be rendered in the vernacular of the other, without losing its force or even sound; and that is more than can be said for French or Italian.

This remark does not apply to Moore's love songs, not to some, at least, of his political lyrics, and we cannot doubt that, if translated into vernacular Irish, and printed as ballads, they would succeed.

Sometimes, from under the wimples, the mothers look up, and in the vernacular modestly bespeak their trade: in the bottles "honey of grapes," in the jars "strong drink."

And expertness in all these things, acquired in the Latin, was certain sooner or later to be transferred to the vernacular.

Raymond, after an instant's surprise, made a response in his unstudied vernacular.

Notwithstanding he was now approaching his seventieth year, his health being unbroken and his constitution very robust, my father resolved vigorously to devote himself to the composition of the history of our vernacular Literature.

Lastly, a series of vague appeals to revolt, written in the vernacular, partly in prose, partly in doggerel rhyme, have been preserved and seem to testify to a deliberate propaganda of lawlessness.

It is well known that of all the instruments employed by the Reformers of Germany, of England, and of Scotland, for the purpose of moving the public mind, the most powerful was the Bible translated into the vernacular tongues.

Just as soon as the enlargements become chronic, they pour out a thick mucous secretion, which quickly becomes purulent, or, in the vernacular, "matter."

In the vernacular the point is brought out by the onomatopoeic character of the lines, which cannot be rendered in English.

Composing verses in the vernacular Gaelic, he contrived, by vending them, to add considerably to his finances.

Usually the frontiersman spoke fair English, but at times he dropped into the vernacular of the plains.

The vernacular Irish literature is there to prove that Irish fancy gives too much rather than too little.

Printing was making the Greek and Latin classics newly accessible, and France and Italy, awake before England to the new life, were storing the vernacular with translations and with new creations.

He writes good London English, for he, like many of 'the infernally good fellows' of Fleet Street, 'don't you know,' believes that the vernacular is only written in its virgin purity in that city.

If Diderot had inquired into the vernacular productions of the country, he would have found that here also the wave of reaction against French conventions, the tide of English simplicity and domestic sentimentalism, had passed into literature.

Their vernacular tongue is what they call Patois; though in so calling it, they do it injustice.

They laughed at her swaggering stride, her masculine dress, the vernacular which was their own speech, but there was quickly established between them and her a good-humored familiarity which was greatly to her liking.

However keenly I felt these things, I had learned that modesty amounted to little in the army; so I pushed my nag steadily forward and scattered the camp vernacular, in the shape of imprecations, left and right.