All 16 Uses
diverge
in
The American Language, by Mencken
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- On American spelling, with its wide and constantly visible divergences from English usages, there was little more.†
*
- The Diverging Streams—Thomas Jefferson, with his usual prevision, saw clearly more than a century ago that the American people, as they increased in numbers and in the diversity of their national interests and racial strains, would make changes in their mother tongue, as they had already made changes in the political institutions of their inheritance.†
- This doctrine, of course, is not supported by the known laws of [Pg003] language, nor has it prevented the large divergences that we shall presently examine, but all the same it has worked steadily toward a highly artificial formalism, and as steadily against the investigation of the actual national speech.†
- Fraternizing was made difficult by the wide divergence in vocabulary and pronunciation—a divergence interpreted by each side as a sign of uncouthness.†
- Fraternizing was made difficult by the wide divergence in vocabulary and pronunciation—a divergence interpreted by each side as a sign of uncouthness.†
- Even in the United Kingdom there are wide divergences.†
- The American vocabulary, of course, must be given first attention, for in it the earliest American divergences are embalmed and it tends to grow richer and freer year after year, [Pg035] but attention will also be paid to materials and ways of speech that are less obvious, and in particular to certain definite tendencies of the grammar of spoken American, hitherto wholly neglected.†
- And eight years before the Declaration Franklin himself had drawn up a characteristically American scheme of spelling reform, and had offered plenty of proof in it, perhaps unconsciously, that the standards of spelling and pronunciation in the New World had already diverged noticeably from those accepted on the other side of the ocean.†
- This was also the period of the first great immigrations, and the American people now came into contact, on a large scale, with peoples of divergent race, particularly Germans, Irish Catholics from the South of Ireland (the Irish of colonial days "were descendants of Cromwell's army, and came from the North of Ireland"),[28] and, on the Pacific Coast, Chinese.†
- nurse hospital-nurse transom (of door) fanlight trolley-car tramcar truck (vehicle) lorry truck (of a railroad car) bogie trunk box typewriter (operator) typist typhoid-fever enteric undershirt vest vaudeville-theatre music-hall vegetables greens vest waistcoat warden (of a prison) governor warehouse stores wash-rag face-cloth wash-stand wash-hand-stand wash-wringer mangle waste-basket waste-paper-basket whipple-tree[2] splinter-bar witness-stand witness-box wood-alcohol methylated-spirits [Pg102] § 2 /Differences in Usage/—The differences here listed, most of them between words in everyday employment, are but examples of a divergence in usage which extends to every department of daily life.†
- / § 3 /Honorifics/—Among the honorifics and euphemisms in everyday use one finds many notable divergences between the two languages.†
- In their vocabularies of opprobrium and profanity English and Americans diverge sharply.†
- The thing lies deeper than vocabulary and [Pg140] even than pronunciation and intonation; the divergences show themselves in habits of speech that are fundamental and almost indefinable.†
- Between the two lies an abyss separating two cultures, two habits of mind, two diverging tongues.†
- All he hears in relation to it is a series of sneers and prohibitions, most of them grounded, not upon principles deduced from its own nature, but upon its divergences from the theoretical language that he is so unsuccessfully taught.†
- One is a divergence in orthography due to differences in pronunciation.†
Definitions:
-
(1)
(diverge) to move apart; or be or become different
- (2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)