Sample sentences for SOLECISM - verbalworkout.com

(click/touch triangles for details)

Definition

a grammatical error

or:

a socially awkward or tactless act

Don't mistake her solecisms for a lack of intelligence.

a good deal afraid of making herself disadvantageously conspicuous by some solecism or blunder
Charlotte Bronte -- Jane Eyre
Keats's solecisms, according to Bennett, go beyond the lexical level and clearly manifest themselves within the structural organization of his poems.
Kris Steyaert
George W. Bush was notorious for his solecisms.
MOS: Good advocate, Prithee not rail, nor threaten out of place thus; Thou'lt make a solecism, as madam says.
Ben Jonson -- Volpone
But she knew that to her they did matter, these solecisms and mixed tenses of the table.
Sinclair Lewis -- Main Street
A man so conventional, so scrupulously correct as the Director–and to commit so gross a solecism!
Aldous Huxley -- Brave New World
However, it was easy to ignore a rich man's solecism.
George Bernard Shaw -- Man And Superman
The balance has to be redressed by the more fashionable papers, which usually combine capable art criticism with West-End solecism on politics and sociology.
George Bernard Shaw -- Mrs. Warren's Profession
He was an Arab, whose interest in the consequences was but general; on the other hand, Ben-Hur was an Israelite and a Jew, with more than a special interest in—if the solecism can be pardoned—the truth of the fact.
Lew Wallace -- Ben Hur
For this reason she was fond of seeing great crowds and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures—a class of efforts as to which she had often committed the conscious solecism of forgiving them much bad painting for the sake of the subject.
Henry James -- The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1
For this reason she was fond of seeing great crowds and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures—a class of efforts as to which she had often committed the conscious solecism of forgiving them much bad painting for the sake of the subject.
Henry James -- The Portrait of a Lady - Volumes 1 & 2
I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this, that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses; and these I have frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic fowl.
Herman Melville -- Moby Dick
Anticipating in Lapidus pere someone like Schlepperman—the comic Jew of Jack Benny's radio program, with his Seventh Avenue accent and hopeless solecisms—I had discovered instead a soft-spoken patrician at ease with his wealth, whose voice was pleasantly edged with the broad vowels and lambent languor of Harvard, from which I discovered he had graduated in chemistry summa cum laude, carrying along with him the expertise to produce the victorious Worm.
William Styron -- Sophie's Choice
The important truth, which it unequivocally pronounces in the present case, is that a sovereignty over sovereigns, a government over governments, a legislation for communities, as contradistinguished from individuals, as it is a solecism in theory, so in practice it is subversive of the order and ends of civil polity, by substituting VIOLENCE in place of LAW, or the destructive COERCION of the SWORD in place of the mild and salutary COERCION of the MAGISTRACY.
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, & John Jay -- The Federalist Papers
Your garb and manner were restricted by rule; your air was often diffident, and altogether that of one refined by nature, but absolutely unused to society, and a good deal afraid of making herself disadvantageously conspicuous by some solecism or blunder; yet when addressed, you lifted a keen, a daring, and a glowing eye to your interlocutor's face: there was penetration and power in each glance you gave; when plied by close questions, you found ready and round answers.
Charlotte Bronte -- Jane Eyre
I would be loth to contest publicly With any gentlewoman, or to seem Froward, or violent, as the courtier says; It comes too near rusticity in a lady, Which I would shun by all means: and however I may deserve from master Would-be, yet T'have one fair gentlewoman thus be made The unkind instrument to wrong another, And one she knows not, ay, and to persever; In my poor judgment, is not warranted From being a solecism in our sex, If not in manners.
Ben Jonson -- Volpone

Dictionary / pronunciation — Google^®Dictionary list — Onelook.com^®

Search for other examples by interest

Interest — Source

solecism