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colloquial
in a sentence

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  • He was down in a subbasement room known colloquially as the Tank because its metal walls were dotted with electronic noisemakers to foil other electronic devices.†   (source)
  • I have relied on Chen's colloquial translation of many things, including the Tang dynasty poem that Lily and Snow Flower wrote on each other's bodies.†   (source)
  • Salander is, to put it in colloquial terms, stark raving mad.†   (source)
  • Well, it was a colloquial expression, Charlie would say.†   (source)
  • Many did because its editors had dropped the colloquial or slang labels people were used to.†   (source)
  • I didn't know what to make of his gesture save its unorthodoxy, its colloquial and unprofessional tone.†   (source)
  • Now it was clear and choice of words and phrasing was consistent—colloquial to me, scholarly to Prof, gallant to Wyoh, variation one expects of mature adults.†   (source)
  • Inside the château they spoke a terse form of colloquial Office Hebrew that was beyond the reach of mere translators.†   (source)
  • Instead of the more proper "as if," I'd used the colloquial "like"—e. g., "He ran like a dog" vs. He ran as if he were a dog.†   (source)
  • Even his daughter here, he continues, little Zosia, whose education had perhaps not been of the broadest, speaks with such fluency that she not only has perfect mastery of Hochsprache, the standard German of the schools, but of the colloquial Umgangssprache, and furthermore, can duplicate for the Doctor's enjoyment almost any accent which lies in between.†   (source)
  • He talked with richness and depth without loosing his colloquial charm.
  • No, Charlie would say, a colloquial expression was different from a cliche.†   (source)
  • The power of those simple, colloquial words is enormous.†   (source)
  • What did "colloquial" mean?†   (source)
  • Nowadays, if you look at even the most formal publications, things like The New Yorker or the New York Times, you will find a wide variety of colloquial or slangy language used even in news articles.†   (source)
  • Another factor is twenty-four-hour news on cable TV and radio, where much of the reporting is done ad lib, making acceptable the values of spoken language, discursive and colloquial, an intellectual exercise different from that demanded in written reportage.†   (source)
  • A lot of attention had been paid to technical languages of science and mathematics, but the colloquial usages of everyday speech, the literary and philosophical dialects in which men do their thinking about the problems of morals, politics, religion, and psychology—these have been strangely neglected.†   (source)
  • The Hizb, as it was known colloquially, was active in more than fifty countries and counted more than a million followers.†   (source)
  • On the other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial.†   (source)
  • "Please don't be quite so colloquial—or shall I say VULGAR?"†   (source)
  • "I'll be as damn colloquial as I want to.†   (source)
  • He remembered that to Clif Clawson it had been pretentious to use any phrase which was not as colloquial and as smutty as the speech of a truck-driver, and that his own discourse had differed from Clif's largely in that it had been less fantastic and less original.†   (source)
  • He is much more a man of fuzziness and feelings, feelings are his cup of tea, so to speak—if you'll forgive me the colloquial phrase.†   (source)
  • A small-town bungalow, the wives of a village doctor and a village dry-goods merchant, a provincial teacher, a colloquial brawl over paying a servant a dollar more a week.†   (source)
  • Colloquial.†   (source)
  • Terry was rough, he was surly, he was colloquial, he despised many fine and gracious things, he offended many fine and gracious people, but these acerbities made up the haircloth robe wherewith he defended a devotion to such holy work as no cowled monk ever knew.†   (source)
  • Perceiving the necessity of doing something to disarm this female Cerberus, before his own purpose could be accomplished, the Doctor, reluctant as he was to encounter her tongue, found himself compelled to invite a colloquial communication.†   (source)
  • No one had interfered in the dispute, which was beyond the French colloquial powers of Edward Dorrit, Esquire, and scarcely within the province of the ladies.†   (source)
  • When no such regular minister offered, a kind of colloquial prayer or two was made by some of the more gifted members, and a sermon was usually read, from Sterne, by Mr. Richard Jones.†   (source)
  • I have known eager opponents of democracy who allowed their children to address them with perfect colloquial equality.†   (source)
  • One of them was that he went every day to the American banker's, where he found a post-office that was almost as sociable and colloquial an institution as in an American country town.†   (source)
  • He was the most reserved, the least colloquial of men, and this enquiring authoress was constantly flashing her lantern into the quiet darkness of his soul.†   (source)
  • By half-past five, post meridian, Horse Guards' time, it has even elicited a new remark from the Honourable Mr. Stables, which bids fair to outshine the old one, on which he has so long rested his colloquial reputation.†   (source)
  • This, too, is appropriate, for Homer's poetry always sounded "old" to Greek ears; it was not colloquial, everyday language but formal, stylized speech from first to last.†   (source)
  • During my stay at Starkfield I lodged with a middle-aged widow colloquially known as Mrs. Ned Hale.†   (source)
  • For some little time the jurymen hang about the Sol's Arms colloquially.†   (source)
  • He spoke to Philip in correct, rather archaic English, having learned it from a study of the English classics, not from conversation; and it was odd to hear him use words colloquially which Philip had only met in the plays of Shakespeare.†   (source)
  • But on night duty, alone, he had to face the self he had been afraid to uncover, and he was homesick for the laboratory, for the thrill of uncharted discoveries, the quest below the surface and beyond the moment, the search for fundamental laws which the scientist (however blasphemously and colloquially he may describe it) exalts above temporary healing as the religious exalts the nature and terrible glory of God above pleasant daily virtues.†   (source)
  • I go on colloquially ….†   (source)
  • They are strong in English, but tend to become weak in colloquial American.†   (source)
  • Colloquial American uses the same rubber-stamps of speech.†   (source)
  • He may master it as a Korean, bred in the colloquial Onmun, may master the literary Korean-Chinese, but he never thinks in it or quite feels it.†   (source)
  • But /wiseheimer/ remains [Pg152] in colloquial use as a facetious synonym for /smart-aleck/, and after awhile it may gradually acquire dignity.†   (source)
  • / A Glossary of Colloquial Slang and Technical Terms in Use in the Stock Exchange and in the Money Market, by A. J. Wilson, London, 1895.†   (source)
  • Its use is one of the peculiarities that Englishmen most quickly notice in American colloquial speech today.†   (source)
  • And in the same way /party/ has been borrowed from the terminology of the law and made to do colloquial duty as a synonym for /person/.†   (source)
  • In English colloquial usage /jolly/ means almost anything; it intensifies all other adjectives, even including /miserable/ and /homesick/.†   (source)
  • Bartlett listed it as an Americanism, but Thornton rejected it, apparently because, in the sense of a collapse, it has come into colloquial use in England.†   (source)
  • America has enormously enriched the language, not only with new words, but (since the American mind is, on the whole, quicker and wittier than the English) with apt and luminous colloquial metaphors.†   (source)
  • In "I have /got/ the measles" /got/ is historically a sort of auxiliary of /have/, and in colloquial American, as we have seen in the examples just given, the auxiliary has obliterated the verb.†   (source)
  • American books, newspapers and magazines, especially the last, circulate in England in large number, and some of their characteristic locutions pass into colloquial speech.†   (source)
  • The sport of boating, so popular on the Thames, has also given colloquial English some familiar terms, almost unknown in the United States, /e. g./, /punt/ and /weir/.†   (source)
  • Moreover, it survived, at least in part, even the attack that was then made upon it by the professors of the new-born science of English grammar, and to this day "it is /me/" is still in more or less good colloquial use.†   (source)
  • Low, in an article in the /Westminster Gazette/[22] ironically headed "Ought American to be Taught in our Schools?" has described how the latter-day British business man is "puzzled by his ignorance of colloquial American" and "painfully hampered" thereby in his handling of American trade.†   (source)
  • In the last chapter we glanced at several salient differences between the common coin of English and the common coin of American—that is, the verbs and adjectives in constant colloquial use—the rubber-stamps, so to speak, of the two languages.†   (source)
  • Here are 200 of them, all chosen from the simplest colloquial vocabularies and without any attempt at plan or completeness: /American/ /English/ ash-can dust-bin baby-carriage pram backyard garden baggage luggage baggage-car luggage-van ballast (railroad) metals bath-tub bath beet beet-root bid (noun) tender bill-board hoarding boarder paying-guest boardwalk (seaside) promenade bond (finance) debenture boot Blucher, or Wellington brakeman brakesman bucket pail bumper (car) buffer…†   (source)
  • …terms for which the English have different compounds," as /bank-bill/, (/bank-note/), /book-store/ (/book-seller's shop/), /bottom-land/ (/interval land/), /clapboard/ (/pale/), /sea-board/ (/sea-shore/), /side-hill/ (/hill-side/). f. "Certain colloquial phrases, apparently idiomatic, and very expressive," as /to cave in/, /to flare up/, /to flunk out/, /to fork over/, /to hold on/, /to let on/, /to stave off/, /to take on/. g. Intensives, "often a matter of mere temporary fashion," as…†   (source)
  • There is surely no English novelist of equal rank whose prose shows so much of colloquial looseness and ease as one finds in the prose of Howells: to find a match for it one must go to the prose of the neo-Celts, professedly modelled upon the speech of peasants, and almost proudly defiant of English grammar and syntax, and to the prose of the English themselves before the Restoration.†   (source)
  • He must know the language colloquially or not at all….†   (source)
  • In Ireland "/Will/ I light the fire, ma'am?" is colloquially sound.†   (source)
  • His saloon is a /public house/, or, colloquially, a /pub/.†   (source)
  • Save he be in the United Free Church of Scotland, he is never a /minister/; save he be a nonconformist, he is never a /pastor/; a clergyman of the Establishment is always either a /rector/, a /vicar/ or a /curate/, and colloquially a /parson/.†   (source)
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