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illiterate
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  • But if I recall correctly, this is an age when ninety percent of the population are illiterate.†   (source)
  • He ran on a platform of improving the school system, fighting illiteracy, and trying to find innovative solutions to the metastasizing drug trade that was poisoning life in major areas of the city.†   (source)
  • D., George Mason L niversity There is enough mathematical illiteracy in this country, and we don't need the world's highest IQ propagating more.†   (source)
  • I couldn't ask Gordy because then he'd know I was an illiterate Indian idiot.†   (source)
  • I learned how to preach the word to a lot of illiterate convicts, but they were no more ignorant than a lot of other folk.†   (source)
  • Miss Phelan, You certainly may hone your writing skills on such flat, passionless subjects as drunk driving and illiteracy.†   (source)
  • He, a Saigon sophisticate, thinks of them as illiterate mountain people, peasants.†   (source)
  • Some illiterates held writing in disdain; others seemed to have a superstitious reverence for the written word, as if it were some sort of magic.†   (source)
  • You poor, illiterate boy.†   (source)
  • An illiterate man, Muhammad was visited by the angel Gabriel (Jibril in Arabic), who related to him the words of God.†   (source)
  • She was illiterate.†   (source)
  • Would it not be better, finer, braver to leave the rubbish where it lies and walk out into the world a free untrammelled illiterate Superman?†   (source)
  • For a few years, she used her degree to work as a volunteer in a Philadelphia social service agency that helped pregnant, unwed mothers; then she moved on to run a weekly reading group for literate and illiterate senior citizens at the local Ewing library, which she still does today.†   (source)
  • A dog doesn't care if you are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, clever or dull.†   (source)
  • They said in the newspaper that I was illiterate, but I could read some even then.†   (source)
  • Young and old, poor and rich, scholarly gentlemen and illiterate servant girls—only to Father did it seem that they were all alike.†   (source)
  • We have-a huge workforce that is illiterate or aliterate and relies on TV-which is sort of an oral tradition.†   (source)
  • In just the past three years he had encountered countless threats to his future that might have put an end to it had he remained socially unconnected to white people: illiteracy, bad grades, car crashes, a night with the Memphis police, an NCAA investigation, men in the street who offered to become his agent.†   (source)
  • It wasn't uncommon for some refugee children to be both illiterate in their native languages and innumerate—they had never learned the simplest math skills.†   (source)
  • He was a full-blooded Indian, untamed, illiterate, and endowed with quiet wiles and a messianic vocation that aroused a demented fanaticism in his men.†   (source)
  • She was illiterate until she was sixteen; she grew up in a one-room but and slept with goats and chickens.†   (source)
  • "The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realize about an ecosystem," Kynes said, "is that it's a system.†   (source)
  • The way driving schools prepared functional illiterates for the written part of the driver's exam.†   (source)
  • When your ancestors landed in Alagaesia, they were as illiterate as rabbits.†   (source)
  • But what she wanted to do, in essence, was create a learning epidemic to counter the prevailing epidemics of poverty and illiteracy.†   (source)
  • The only one allowed to give an opinion on Miguel's education was Clara, who managed to convince her that he should be sent to school, unless she wanted him to grow up to be an illiterate hermit.†   (source)
  • And kind of illiterate.†   (source)
  • I met hard-working, illiterate, religious people willing to risk injury and endure pain for the benefit of their families.†   (source)
  • Many of our voters were illiterate, and were likely to be intimidated by the mere idea of voting.†   (source)
  • But I will look about my village at the illiteracy and disease and ignorance and I will not wonder long.†   (source)
  • In developing countries, tormenting the illiterate is usually risk-free; preying on the educated is more perilous.†   (source)
  • One of those Phoenicians who assume all Waldenites are illiterate.†   (source)
  • We are the scholarly and the illiterate, the envied and the ugly, the fierce and the docile.†   (source)
  • Our patients are illiterate.†   (source)
  • On the other hand, my French teacher is clearly illiterate.†   (source)
  • The adulation that Trout was receiving, mindless and illiterate as it was, affected Trout like marijuana.†   (source)
  • Of course two members of the firm were totally illiterate— three, if he chose to count Bolivar—and wouldn't have known Latin from Chinese.†   (source)
  • He has been heard to say, 'My dear sweet but illiterate wife thinks any word or gesture that does not smack of brickyard brawn and brutality is a word or gesture of weak dandyism.'†   (source)
  • Blomkvist considered himself virtually computer illiterate, but Salander handled computers as if she had made a pact with the Devil.†   (source)
  • Czech towns were decorated with thousands of hand-painted posters bearing ironic texts, epigrams, poems, and cartoons of Brezhnev and his soldiers, jeered at by one and all as a circus of illiterates.†   (source)
  • Graffiti, illiteracy, petty theft.†   (source)
  • How he had copied the group of letters out on a piece of brown paper; copied, as illiterate people do, every curlicue, arch, and bend in the letters, and presented it to the midwife.†   (source)
  • She'll assume you're illiterate.†   (source)
  • She said that I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy.†   (source)
  • Only a handful seemed to care about learning, and more than a few were fundamentally illiterate.†   (source)
  • He sees the yellow army barracks, where illiterate young soldiers play with guns the rich people bought for them, guns used to murder his father two weeks ago.†   (source)
  • Uniformly, the infected women named that kind of desperation, deep poverty and illiteracy, as their reason for having taken what appeared to be the real risk for AIDS, which was cohabiting with truck drivers or soldiers.†   (source)
  • Illiterate high-altitude porters in Pakistan's Karakoram have put down their packs to make paltry wages with him so their children can have the education they were forced to do without.†   (source)
  • Us illiterate people from the desert?†   (source)
  • They were written in Greek, by authors who had a modicum of education—unlike Jesus's fishermen disciples, who were illiterate, like ninety percent of the population.†   (source)
  • "I thought we agreed that—" Her voice was heavy with sarcasm: "We've agreed that they're backward, that they're illiterate, that they're dirty and comical and shiftless and no good, they're infants and they're stupid, some of them, but we haven't agreed on one thing and we never will.†   (source)
  • Nothing written in her own hand would survive—no letters, diaries, or legal papers with her signature—nor any correspondence addressed to her by any of her family, and so, since it is also known that letters were frequently read aloud to her, there is reason to believe that Susanna Boylston Adams was illiterate.†   (source)
  • I also did not perceive that this caused conflict between my aunt and my mother and grandmother, both of whom were illiterate in nu shu just as my father and uncle were illiterate in men's writing.†   (source)
  • I must have tinkered too much wondering how my invisible grandmother, illiterate and dependent on letter writers, could give us candy free.†   (source)
  • Not to any illiterate villager you can bully and terrorise.†   (source)
  • My mother was illiterate; she had only received a third-grade education.†   (source)
  • The soldiers were finding nothing but garments and kitchen utensils; there were no letters, no books, not even a newspaper, as if the room were the habitation of an illiterate.†   (source)
  • I was on my way to a battle that was none of my business, surrounded by simple, illiterate men who were no part of my universe, on a mission from a lunatic-mythical god.†   (source)
  • Don't need a doctor-an illiterate man can read you, Cesar.†   (source)
  • You illiterates always run from the police.†   (source)
  • Language, however, does not belong to the illiterate or to bodies of people forming tendentious and propagandistic interest groups, determined to use it for what they (usually mistakenly) believe to be their advantage.†   (source)
  • To be pounded to death in the cold surf was preferable to being shot by a row of illiterate marksmen who had not yet picked their teeth clean of the previous night s scungili.†   (source)
  • Let us leave the lamentations to the illiterate!†   (source)
  • The letters were boring and nearly illiterate.†   (source)
  • By definition, the 15 to 20 percent of Confederate soldiers who were illiterate are not included.†   (source)
  • I think today if we forbade our illiterate children to touch the wonderful things of our literature, perhaps they might steal them and find secret joy.†   (source)
  • Meo Martinez was an illiterate Mexican just two steps away from a jacal.†   (source)
  • They are so close to the days when their ancestors were kept totally illiterate, when their ancestors learned to read and write at the risk of severe punishment, that learning is an almost sacred privilege now.†   (source)
  • Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.†   (source)
  • It was designed by an illiterate Indian, who had seen pictures of the things on postcards from Europe.†   (source)
  • Hopelessly unfunny, though straining for laughs on every page, these illiterate daydreams are an attempt to romanticize what must be a ghastly existence, the author eagerly equating the comic vicissitudes of her domestic life with those in the household of a brain surgeon.†   (source)
  • Dacians, Herulians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Hyperboreans, heavy wheels without spokes, eyes sunk in fat, sodomy, double chins, illiterate emperors, fish fed on the flesh of learned slaves.†   (source)
  • A hundred cultured boys and girls slipping back to illiteracy, back to the stone age, the veneer sloughing away ....reverting to savagery.†   (source)
  • The energies and talents of all of us are needed to meet the challenges—the internal ones of our cities, our farms, ourselves—to be successful in the fight for freedom around the globe, in the battles against illiteracy, hunger and disease.†   (source)
  • As for Miriam, what possible harm for a working girl in an office, who met only loudmouthed salesmen and illiterate shipping clerks, to make the acquaintance of a fine scholarly boy?†   (source)
  • He held it as illiterate natives always handle printed paper: as if it is something that might explode in their faces.†   (source)
  • We have so many people in our country who are illiterate.   (source)
    illiterate = unable to read or write
  • What does he know, that illiterate Hazara?   (source)
  • He felt ashamed but had no choice if he didn't want to end up illiterate.   (source)
  • We have almost fifty million illiterate adults, two thirds of whom are women, like my own mother.   (source)
  • She had a sister in Iran, in Mashad, and, since Ziba was illiterate, she'd ask me to write her sister letters once in a while.   (source)
  • That Hassan would grow up illiterate like Ali and most Hazaras had been decided the minute he had been born, perhaps even the moment he had been conceived in Sanaubar's unwelcoming womb—after all, what use did a servant have for the written word?   (source)
  • My father was astonished and pleased—in our country few doctors bother explaining anything to an illiterate woman.   (source)
  • But despite his illiteracy, or maybe because of it, Hassan was drawn to the mystery of words, seduced by a secret world forbidden to him.   (source)
    illiteracy = inability to read and write
  • We know him affectionately as Badshah Sahib, and though he was completely illiterate, he managed to bring peace to the valley.   (source)
    illiterate = unable to read or write
  • He had studied in a British school in Peshawar, and perhaps because his own father was illiterate he was passionate about schools and built many, as well as hospitals and roads.   (source)
  • Let them be illiterate.   (source)
  • "Two dollars you promised me."
    Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy notes, which Parsons entered in a small notebook, in the neat handwriting of the illiterate.   (source)
    illiterate = uninformed or unable to read and write
  • Southern white illiterates brought their biases intact to the West from the hills of Arkansas and the swamps of Georgia.†   (source)
  • The more educated knew what south and east were, and asked of the illiterates who wanted to go north or west how Bulgaria could be north or west of Hungary.†   (source)
  • I was impatient because I had failed to turn illiterates into lovers of the great classics in the span of a single month.†   (source)
  • The five illiterates who were served to me like hors d'oeuvres at the beginning of the year would still qualify for membership in that august classification.†   (source)
  • From tutoring sessions, Luma knew the boy was almost completely illiterate.†   (source)
  • They are the ultimate in disposable workers: illegal, illiterate, impoverished, untrained.†   (source)
  • McMurphy, Vera's English rivals yours for illiteracy.†   (source)
  • An illiterate sad-eyed virgin lives in a whorehouse in a slum district of San Juan.†   (source)
  • "Illiterate young boys often wind up in [terrorist] camps," he quoted Mortenson as saying.†   (source)
  • This woman was like my mother, illiterate in nu shu.†   (source)
  • Some might see this as a cult of illiteracy.†   (source)
  • Today, from the darkness of illiteracy, the light of education shines bright.†   (source)
  • You have an atrophied social sense, just like an illiterate peasant woman or a bourgeois diehard.†   (source)
  • A church had donated the books in order to rid the island of illiteracy.†   (source)
  • Complete illiteracy was an animal I had never encountered before.†   (source)
  • Their leader was a mysterious, illiterate, one-eyed recluse named Mullah Omar, who, Rasheed said with some amusement, called himself Ameer-ul-Mumineen, Leader of the Faithful.†   (source)
  • This hobby, Mahmoud insisted, was taking them away from their schoolwork, and if they forsook their education for pigeons, he would be stuck with not only the birds but two illiterate sons.†   (source)
  • He said that I was little more than a child, a poor motherless child and to all intents and purposes an orphan, cast out upon the world with nobody to teach me any better; and I'd had to work hard for my bread, from an early age, and was industry itself; and I was very ignorant and uneducated, and illiterate, and little better than a halfwit; and very soft and pliable, and easily imposed upon.†   (source)
  • By the next day, I am ready to mail my first letter to Elaine Stein, listing the ideas I thought worthy journalism material: the prevalence of illiteracy in Mississippi; the high number of drunk-driving accidents in our county; the limited job opportunities for women.†   (source)
  • This was the grin he reserved for tourists, as he had grown used to their astounding scientific illiteracy.†   (source)
  • It's down-to-earth, it's simple, it's untrue, and it's familiar enough and trivial enough to be understood and loved by our greedy, nervous, illiterate sponsors.'†   (source)
  • Tomas was on the point of telling him emphatically that he would neither write nor sign any text whatever, but at the last moment he changed his tone and said mildly, I'm no illiterate, am I?†   (source)
  • But, Matron, the priesthood here is almost illiterate—Gebrew, your watchman, doesn't understand the litany that he recites because it is in Geez, which no one speaks.†   (source)
  • She was calm, she thought, it was only time that had suddenly lost its continuity and had broken her perception into separate snatches: she knew the moment when she saw the number-then the moment when she looked at a list on a board in the moldy half-light of a doorway and saw the words "John Galt, 5th, rear" scrawled in pencil by some illiterate hand-then the moment when she stopped at the foot of a stairway, glanced up at the vanishing angles of the railing and suddenly leaned against the wall, trembling with terror, preferring not to know-then the moment when she felt the movement of her foot coming to rest on the first of the steps-then a single, unbroken progression of lightness, o†   (source)
  • e>tf<")(*>t>o "Every reason which calls for the exclusion of the most wretched, ignorant, dirty, diseased and degraded people of Europe or Asia demands that the illiterate, unclean, peonized masses moving this way from Mexico be stopped at the border...." crackled a speech by a Texas congressman.†   (source)
  • The 7 or 8 percent of white Union soldiers who were illiterate are not represented in the sample, nor are the 70 percent or more of the black soldiers who could not read or write.†   (source)
  • He hired several Indians to work for him, in addition to a monumentally fat woman cook, whom he taught to make the spicy sauces that he was so fond of, and a lame, illiterate maid to wait on Blanca.†   (source)
  • "Mostly those kinds of beatings happen because the husbands are illiterate and uneducated," she added.†   (source)
  • He'd also learned how to design and manage both a public health system and a clinic, built from scratch, in one of the most difficult places imaginable, among people whose governments had kept them illiterate, where on a good day concrete got transported by donkey.†   (source)
  • Besides, all the energy has flowed out to the new developments, to the semi-rural supermarkets, the outdoor movies, new houses with wide lawns and stucco schools where children are confirmed in their illiteracy.†   (source)
  • Without those early Maoists most of China's younger leadership would be illiterate peasants breaking their backs in the field.†   (source)
  • God has selected a poor illiterate undernourished orphan girl to convey a profound message to the world.†   (source)
  • He said it could be used for voting, because the blind or illiterate now have to have someone with them, which means they cannot vote secretly.†   (source)
  • Mother's cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance.†   (source)
  • Farmer wrote to me, about the blocked loans: "I think, sometimes, that I'm going nuts, and that perhaps there is something good about blocking clean water for those who have none, making sure that illiterate children remain so, and preventing the resuscitation of the public health sector in the country most in need of it."†   (source)
  • I had judged from our encounter this morning that you were more intelligent-an illiterate clod, perhaps, certainly a backwoods braggart with no more sensitivity than a goose, but basically intelligent nevertheless.†   (source)
  • Mamitu grew up illiterate in a remote village in Ethiopia and suffered a fistula as a young wife in her first pregnancy.†   (source)
  • I knew this would not be so very much since we were both illiterate, but that boy was like a dried mushroom dropped into boiling water.†   (source)
  • The overworked, often illiterate workers in the nation's slaughterhouses do not always understand the importance of good hygiene.†   (source)
  • She also began to take charge of the training program, so when elite doctors went to Addis Ababa for a few months to learn fistula surgery, their teacher was often an illiterate woman who had never been to a day of school.†   (source)
  • But he is concerned about the introduction of highly complex electromagnetic and nuclear technology into slaughterhouses with a largely illiterate, non-English-speaking workforce.†   (source)
  • "So once again, an illiterate old Balti taught a Westerner how to best go about developing his 'backward' area," Mortenson says.†   (source)
  • and birdbaths and fountains and decorated posts and bright oddments and household colors, the green of 7-Up bottles and blue of Milk of Magnesia, all the vivid tile embedded in cement, the whole complex of structures and gates and panels that were built, hand-built, by one man, alone, an immigrant from somewhere near Naples, probably illiterate, who left his wife and family, or maybe they left him, I wasn't sure, a man whose narrative is mostly blank spaces, date of birth uncertain, until he ends up spending thirty-three years building this thing out of steel rods and broken crockery and pebbles and seashells and soda bottles and wire mesh, all hand-mortared, three thousand sacks of san†   (source)
  • If the meatpacking industry is allowed to continue its recruitment of poor, illiterate, often illegal immigrants, many other industries will soon follow its example.†   (source)
  • Here was this illiterate man, who'd hardly ever left his little village in the Karakoram," Mortenson says.†   (source)
  • Her fiance was illiterate.†   (source)
  • Mortenson thought of Haji Ali, likewise illiterate in Arabic, but tenderly turning the pages of his Koran just the same, and smiled, warming himself over this ember of feeling.†   (source)
  • As these girls grow up, she continued, "they join the ranks of illiterate girls, increasing the gender gap between men and women.... Girls who are denied access to education are more likely to be trapped in a cycle of poverty and disease, forced into child marriage and prostitution, become victims of sex trafficking, domestic violence, and so-called honor killings.†   (source)
  • It would take months and millions of dollars poured into the flailing serpentine arms of the U.S. Intelligence apparatus to untangle for certain what this illiterate man who lived in the last village at the end of a dirt road, without an Internet connection or even a phone, knew instinctively.†   (source)
  • "Lee," he said at last, "I mean no disrespect, but I've never been able to figure why you people still talk pidgin when an illiterate baboon from the black bogs of Ireland, with a head full of Gaelic and a tongue like a potato, learns to talk a poor grade of English in ten years.†   (source)
  • A simple soul, utterly devout, practically illiterate, Lotte seemed to weather the unholy winds of Auschwitz like a crude, sturdy ship, serene in her terrible faith.†   (source)
  • D. had to walk just as far to get food, water or rest-room facilities as the illiterate, and he could be turned away with the same base discourtesy.†   (source)
  • Yet his epistolary style, Sophie had observed, though workable and certainly not illiterate, fell often into clumsy, semi-opaque labyrinthine periods; it had the prosy, crippled rhythms of a man who was Army-educated, a perennial adjutant.†   (source)
  • He was half Buriat, warm-hearted and illiterate; his hair was plaited in thin braids, and he had a sparse mustache and a still sparser beard.†   (source)
  • He passionately sought an idea, inspired, graspable, which in its movement would clearly point the way toward change, an idea like a flash of lightning or a roll of thunder capable of speaking even to a child or an illiterate.†   (source)
  • In her own eyes Mrs. Brown felt as though she was instilling values into the children that their likker-swilling, devil-dancing, illiterate parents.†   (source)
  • They were geographically illiterate.†   (source)
  • The kid I had thought nearly illiterate had memorized the words of a fairly complicated song and developed a diction and sense of timing that was almost perfect.†   (source)
  • It would be convenient to report that Judge Street was a gum-chewing illiterate ex-Klansman elevated to the judgeship by decadent politicians who wished to preserve the status quo.†   (source)
  • When I first envisioned myself on the island, a noble creature enshrined among the illiterate masses working in the primitive conditions that would have warmed the cockles of Henry Thoreau's heart, I did not consider my compulsive need for friends and good conversation.†   (source)
  • Richard, who I knew damn well was illiterate, who could not string the twenty-six letters of the alphabet together, who could not add two and two, and who could not write his name, came striding manfully to the microphone.†   (source)
  • We're lower middle-class: sprinklin' of professional men—10% illiterate laborers.†   (source)
  • But no, he was ex officio an illiterate.†   (source)
  • The total effect is that of crudeness and architectural illiteracy.†   (source)
  • They are simple people, illiterate, tribal people, an easy tool in the hand.†   (source)
  • Indeed it would have seemed more natural if he had been illiterate, like most of the others.†   (source)
  • Rude, illiterate, dirty, he was a bulwark between the ladies and the terrors of Reconstruction.†   (source)
  • His father was a longshoreman, a tall, silent, illiterate man who had never gone to school.†   (source)
  • She was an illiterate black child with a baby whose father she did not know.†   (source)
  • That he was illiterate was an accident; he had got ahead of books, gone where the printing-press could not follow him.†   (source)
  • It was possible that Grandpa's southern accent and his illiteracy made him mispronounce his own name.†   (source)
  • She was proud and pleased at all their extravagances; his flowery illiteracy was another proof to her of his superior intelligence.†   (source)
  • But she was so witty and clever and warmhearted that she made of living a high joyous thing and in time he began to overlook her illiteracy.†   (source)
  • Abel was a shrewd, grave giant, illiterate, kind of heart, older than the other boys and with as good or better manners in the presence of ladies.†   (source)
  • These workers, illiterate but sharp-witted, who for some reason called themselves The Club, assumed that the better-educated readers looked down on them.†   (source)
  • Frowning gravely, he leaned upon the counter with feet crossed, reading, in a somewhat illiterate monotone, what they had written.†   (source)
  • Any illiterate maniac, any worthless moron who commits some revolting murder, gets shrieks of sympathy from us and marshals an army of humanitarian defenders.†   (source)
  • Already many other Southern states had illiterate negroes in high public office and legislatures dominated by negroes and Carpetbaggers.†   (source)
  • The policyholder, usually an illiterate black woman, would dig up her policy from the bottom of a trunk or a chest and hand it to the superintendent.†   (source)
  • When the health authorities tried to explain to the poor and illiterate that vaccination was a giving of the harmless form of smallpox to work up immunity against the deadly form, the parents didn't believe it.†   (source)
  • Most of the policyholders were illiterate and did not know that their policies carried clauses severely restricting their benefit payments, and, as an insurance agent, it was not my duty to tell them.†   (source)
  • When noon came, she put off her apron and sneaked away from the hospital while Mrs. Merriwether was busy writing a letter for a gangling, illiterate mountaineer.†   (source)
  • You may see that a beautiful woman is inferior to a non-beautiful one, that the literate is inferior to the illiterate, that the rich is inferior to the poor, and the able to the incompetent.†   (source)
  • Most of them were illiterate migrants from southern plantations and they had never been vitally interested in politics until they had entered the Communist party.†   (source)
  • Usually the occupants of the rooms were former Confederate soldiers of the rougher, illiterate type, homeless men, men without families, beating their way about the country in hope of finding work.†   (source)
  • But there were no earnings, there were only debts, and so there were no free schools and there was a generation of children growing up in ignorance who would spread the seeds of illiteracy down the years.†   (source)
  • He was handicapped by illiteracy and he offered me the job of accompanying him on trips into the delta plantation area to write and figure for him, at wages of five dollars a week.†   (source)
  • Of course the illiterate ones resent your references to anything farther away than Minneapolis.†   (source)
  • Clay is always telling me what an illiterate boob I am.†   (source)
  • "Here, I opened your letter too," said Kitty, handing him an illiterate letter.†   (source)
  • Now I am twenty-eight and am in reality more illiterate than many schoolboys of fifteen.†   (source)
  • Oh, that is Keek—an illiterate fellow, you know.†   (source)
  • The aunt was simple and illiterate; the niece was simple but lively.†   (source)
  • —You confined to the society of the illiterate and vulgar all your life!†   (source)
  • He was almost illiterate, and very quiet, scarcely speaking to any one.†   (source)
  • He was illiterate; he could not read, but he could sing, and like the illiterate nightingale was sometimes the composer of his own song.†   (source)
  • espress myself"—I would triumph over her with an ironical and brutal common sense worthy of Dr. Percepied; and if she went on: "All the same she was a geological relation; there is always the respect due to your geology," I would shrug my shoulders and say: "It is really very good of me to discuss the matter with an illiterate old woman who cannot speak her own language," adopting, to deliver judgment on Francoise, the mean and narrow outlook of the pedant, whom those who are most contemptuous of him in the impartiality of their own minds are only too prone to copy when they are obliged to play a part upon the vulgar stage of life.†   (source)
  • There was a regular supply of inexpensive fiction written to order by poor hacks for the consumption of the illiterate.†   (source)
  • Here is one of them now,—a tall brown man, a hard worker and a hard drinker, illiterate, but versed in farmlore, as his nodding crops declare.†   (source)
  • Moreover, he was as illiterate as old Mrs. Mingott, and considered "fellows who wrote" as the mere paid purveyors of rich men's pleasures; and no one rich enough to influence his opinion had ever questioned it.†   (source)
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