|
|
|
More "Possessive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Hero Myths" is slightly different from that given in his "Native Calendar," above mentioned. In the former he says uotan "is from the pure Maya root word tan, which means primarily 'the breast,' or that which is in the front or in the middle of the body; with the possessive prefix it becomes utan. In Tzental this word means both 'breast' and 'heart.'" It must be admitted that these explanations are apparently somewhat strained, yet it is possible they are substantially correct, as they appear to receive some support ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas
... people who possessed this trick, as for performers in a circus; he certainly did not envy them, for he knew that he could buy them, as a carpenter buys tools. His attitude was that of the genuine bourgeois towards the artist: possessive, incurious, and contemptuous. Dayson, however, ignored George Cannon's attitude, perhaps did not even perceive what it was. He gloried in his performance. Accustomed to dictate extempore speeches on any subject whatever to his shorthand pupils, he was ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... thicker thicket, and found it to be a thatch of branches woven to screen the muzzles of a battery. The big guns were all about us, crouched in these sylvan lairs like wild beasts waiting to spring; and near each gun hovered its attendant gunner, proud, possessive, important as a ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... interrogation point. At the day of Pentecost people were saying, "What do these things mean?" To-day they never think of saying it. I have been told in a little pamphlet issued by an English writer that the church has lost her possessive case, which means that somehow she has gone on without realizing that the risen, glorified Christ is her blessed Lord. It is a great thing to say "Jesus"; infinitely greater is it to say "My Jesus." The ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... back was to the room; I saw them over his shoulder, in the lead a tall blonde, very smartly dressed, but not in evening clothes; in severe, exclusive street wear. The man with her, good looking, almost her own type, had that possessive air which seems somehow unmistakable—and there was a look about the half dozen companions after them, as they settled themselves in a great flurry of scraping chairs, that made ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... John's Cemetery at the very core of the town, with streets of quiet, old-time houses on two sides, and busy, bustling, modern thoroughfares on the others. Every citizen of Kingsport feels a thrill of possessive pride in Old St. John's, for, if he be of any pretensions at all, he has an ancestor buried there, with a queer, crooked slab at his head, or else sprawling protectively over the grave, on which all the main facts of his history are recorded. For the ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... conditions, into whose and whom; but that and which always remain the same, with the exception of the possessive case, ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... Cossie's hysterical lamentations and outpourings with what patience he could assume; until by degrees the dreadful truth began to dawn on him, that he was selected to replace the faithless Lothario! Of late Cossie's manner had become jealously possessive, She seemed to hold him by a nipping tenacious clutch, and pattered out to meet him at the gate, sat next to him at table, and was invariably his partner at tennis. Once, arriving unseen, he had overheard ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... vulgar extortioner, most decidedly!" she returned, without repudiating the possessive pronoun. "It doesn't follow that I think anything of him—apart from what you did between you ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... or that the severe rule of his daily life had checked long ago, began its struggle for life; and when the same sweet odour came again—he knew now it was the scent of heliotrope—his heart was lifted and he was overcome in a sweet possessive trouble. He sought for the cheque amid the bundle of cheques and, finding it, he pressed the paper to his face. The cheque was written in a thin, feminine handwriting, and was signed "Henrietta Brown," and the name and handwriting were pregnant with occult ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... Adelaide. This was almost war. Mrs. Baxter was a regal and possessive widow from Baltimore whose long and regular visits to Mr. Lanley had once occasioned his family some alarm, though time had now given them a ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... the understanding that had come to her under the consuming fire of his ardent gaze, and in the fierce embrace that was drawing her shaking limbs closer and closer against the man's own pulsating body. She writhed in his arms as he crushed her to him in a sudden access of possessive passion. His head bent slowly down to her, his eyes burned deeper, and, held immovable, she endured the first kiss she had ever received. And the touch of his scorching lips, the clasp of his arms, the close ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... true principle of identity, of selfness, even in our common language. The will, therefore, being indistinguishably one, but the possessive powers triply distinguishable, do perforce involve the notion expressed by a Trinity of ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... double-lobed fin. Laid out on the platform, it kept struggling with convulsive movements, trying to turn over, making such efforts that its final lunge was about to flip it into the sea. But Conseil, being very possessive of his fish, rushed at it, and before I could stop him, he ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... Use of the Apostrophe.—The apostrophe is used to denote the possessive case, to indicate the omission of letters, and to form the plural of signs, figures, ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... revenge as yet. Her love for Paul was still love, but it was perilously near to hatred. She had not reached the point of wishing definitely that he should suffer, but the sight of Etta—beautiful, self-confident, carelessly possessive in respect to Paul—had brought her within measurable distance ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... bourgeoisie, and was—"decent"; there were the two native lairds that reminded him of "parts of speech," one being distinctly alluded to as a definite article, and the other being "of" something, and apparently governed always by that possessive case. There were two or three "workers"—men of power and ability in their several vocations; indeed, there was the general over-proportion of intellect, characteristic of such Scotch gatherings, and often in excess of minor ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... man, it isn't an IT, is it? That wouldn't be grammatical, would it? I think it would be HE. I think so. In that case one would parse it thus: nominative, HE; dative, HIM; possessive, HIS'N. Well, I will consider it a man and call it he until it turns out to be something else. This will be handier than ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... itself was a difference of opinion between Borrow and Lipovzoff, who "thought proper, when the Father Almighty is addressed, to erase the personal and possessive pronouns thou or thine, as often as they occur, and in their stead to make use of the noun as the case may require. For example, 'O Father! thou art merciful' he would render, 'O Father! the Father is merciful.'" Borrow protested, ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... be joking. Now, decline He.' 'Nominative he, possessive his, objective him.' 'You see, his is possessive. Now, you can say his book, but you can't say him book.' 'Yes, I do say hymn book, too,' said the impracticable scholar, with a quizzical twinkle. Each one of these sallies made his young teacher laugh, ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... troubled eyes. She was no longer afraid. After all, strange as he looked, more strangely as he talked, he was her Pierre, her man. The confidence of her heart had not been seriously shaken by his coldness and his moods during this winter. There had been times of fierce, possessive tenderness. She was his own woman, his property; at this low counting did she rate herself. A sane man does no injury to his own possessions. And Pierre, of course, was sane. He was tired, angry, he had been drinking—her ignorance, her inexperience ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... Allys came on the scene it had seemed the pursuit must be successful. They had gone abroad on the same steamer the year before, dawdled through a London season, and come home simultaneously—he rather bored and languid, she of a demure and downcast, but withal possessive, air. She had said they were not engaged—"oh, dear no, only excellent friends," but looking all the while a contradiction of the words. Then unwisely she had taken Hilary to that tiresome tea for the little Rhett girl—and behold! the mischief ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... table, demure, self-contained, yet playing her wildest. It was a game she knew she was to have entirely alone. The game was that she and Rookie were living here in this house in some such potency of possessive bliss that nothing could separate them. She was careless over the terms of it. She was a child, she was a woman, she was everything Rookie wanted her to be. Here they were together, and the universe, finding the combination, ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... of deep blue encircled in black, its hide quite smooth and ending in a double-lobed fin. Laid out on the platform, it kept struggling with convulsive movements, trying to turn over, making such efforts that its final lunge was about to flip it into the sea. But Conseil, being very possessive of his fish, rushed at it, and before I could stop him, he ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest. This is no new discovery. The Gospel says: "Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?" The thought we give to these things is taken away from matters of more importance. And what is worse, the ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... The 's possessive does not exist in Spanish. "My son's house" must always be translated as ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... way of thinking, this expression "my august confederates." Is there not something astounding about the use of the possessive pronoun in connection with the word "august," implying sovereignty? One wonders what part can they have to play, these confederates, led and dominated by a personality as jealous and self-centred as ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... of my justice of peace and his justice of peace. My indolence was conquered by my love of power: I supported the contest; the affair came before our grand jury: I conquered, and Mr. Hardcastle was ever after, of course, my enemy. To English ears the possessive pronouns my and his may sound extraordinary, prefixed to a justice of peace; but, in many parts of Ireland, this language is perfectly correct. A great man talks of making a justice of the ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... vision came to Claire de Wissant. As she went down the cliff-side her lovely eyes rested on these sinister, man-created monsters with a feeling of sisterly, possessive affection. She had become so familiarly acquainted with each and all of them in the last few months; she knew with such a curious, intimate knowledge where they differed, both from each other and also from other submarine craft, not only here, in these familiar waters, but in the waters of France's ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... opinion. In the Yorkshire dialect, when the possessive case is followed by the relative substantive, it is customary to omit the S; but if the relative be understood, and not expressed, the possessive case is formed in the usual manner, as in a ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... with fond admiration; he might have been better pleased had there not been in the look a suggestion of the possessive. "How they do need you! Father says—But I mustn't make you any ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... restricted to members of the Royal Family alone, when used with the Christian name only. A great deal of this feeling was still left; and it will be commonly found (I do not say universally) that when persons of the sixteenth century used the definite article instead of the possessive pronoun, before a title and a Christian name, they meant to indicate that they regarded him of whom they spoke as a royal person. Let me instance Lord Guilford Dudley. Those who called him "the Lord Guilford" were partisans ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... observe the usual idiomatic mode of expressing possession of parts of the body, wearing apparel, etc., by the use of the definite article instead of the possessive adjective his, her, etc., the dative pronoun also being often added to indicate the possessor, as: Yo me corte el dedo, I ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... the extraordinary (or Definite) declension, is thus generally given by Mr Guest for Chaucer. "When the adjective follows the definite article, or the definite pronoun, this, that, or any one of the possessive pronouns—his, her, &c.—it takes what is called its definite form."—(Vol. i. p. 32.) From the Anglo-Saxon definite declension (running through three genders, five cases, and two numbers,) remains, to the language that arose after the Conquest, ONE final E. E.g. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... think; no, not my name, I feel sure.' He accentuated the possessive pronoun strongly, and then proceeded to explain the accentuation, smiling more and more amiably as he did so. 'No, not my name; ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... old woman's face was expressionless. But she moved the coin nearer to her eyes and a smile broke and widened until her whole face was a wrinkle of joy. When she turned in the doorway, the interviewer noticed that the hand jammed into an apron pocket was clutched into a possessive fist, cradling the precious ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... those weeds, not flowers, of speech Which the Seven Dialecticians teach; Filthy Conjunctions, and Dissolute Nouns, And Particles picked from the kennels of towns, With Irregular Verbs for irregular jobs, Chiefly active in rows and mobs, Picking Possessive Pronouns' fobs, And Interjections as bad as a blight, Or an Eastern blast, to the blood and the sight: Fanciful phrases for crime and sin, And smacking of vulgar lips where Gin, Garlic, Tobacco, and offals go in ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... of his will. The will of ordinary men is addressed through their understanding and conscience. Mr. Johnson's understanding and conscience can be addressed only through his will. He puts intellectual principles and the moral law in the possessive case, thinks he pays them a compliment and adds to their authority when he makes them the adjuncts of his petted pronoun "my"; and things to him are reasonable and right, not from any quality inherent in themselves, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... she cried, putting a possessive hand on Lady's flank while the latter turned her dainty head and regarded the girl out of softly-wistful brown eyes. "I wanted her as soon ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... indeed mostly have resorted to it for a prompt benediction on the day. Like no other strong solicitation, among artistic appeals to which one may compare it up and down the whole wonderful country, is the felt neighbouring presence of the overwrought Cathedral in its little proud possessive town: you may so often feel by the week at a time that it stands there really for your own personal enjoyment, your romantic convenience, your small wanton aesthetic use. In such a light shines for me, at all events, under such ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... memory to succeed. Home had been so unbearable that she had taken desperate measures to escape it, but as the white house with its tree and shrub filled yard could be seen more plainly, Kate suddenly was filled with the strongest possessive feeling she ever had known. It was home. It was her home. Her place was there, even as Adam had said. She felt a sudden revulsion against herself that she had stayed away seven years; she should have taken her chances and at least gone to see her mother. She ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... If he said: "My wife is here," and chose to seize her with possessive grasp, she must meekly fold her hands upon her breast, and say: "Even so, my lord. I am yours. Deal with me ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... John! His wife (and the possessive pronoun casts about her an atmosphere of importance) has been made uncomfortable, and he is up in arms. His and no one's else is the right to criticise Mary. What business have these people to interfere? He immediately becomes ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... Pasqualini speaks of a Leopardus, lector de Pudentiana, in the year 384; and in the mosaic of the apse the Redeemer holds a book, on the open page of which is written: "The Lord, defender of the church of Pudens." In course of time the ignorant people changed the word Pudentiana, a possessive adjective, into the name of a saint; and the name Sancta Pudentiana usurped the place of the genuine one. It appears for the first time in a document ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... hour later Pancha, emerging from the alley that led to the Albion's stage door, saw a tall, familiar shape approach from the shadows. Her heart gave a jump, and as her hand was enfolded in a strong, possessive grasp, she could not control the ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... encountered certain difficulties which have been only partially surmounted. As the Cakchiquel, though a written, is not a printed tongue, there has no rule been established as to the separation of verbs and their pronominal subjects, of nouns and their possessive pronouns, of the elements of compound particles, of tense and mode signs, etc. In the MSS. the utmost laxity prevails in these respects, and they seem not to have been settled points in the orthography of the tongue. The frequent elisions and euphonic alterations observable in these ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton
... and Sentences in the S'klallam or Sclallam. 52 ll. 4^o. In Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages, 1st ed., complete. Collected at the Skokomish Reservation in 1878. Includes plural forms and possessive cases of nouns and pronouns and the partial conjugation of the ...
— Catalogue Of Linguistic Manuscripts In The Library Of The Bureau Of Ethnology. (1881 N 01 / 1879-1880 (Pages 553-578)) • James Constantine Pilling
... dialect it is but pedantry that opposes its use, and it matters little moreover from what quarter of the land it may hail, as Stevenson knew when he claimed the right of mingling Ayrshire with his Lothian verse. Even such archaisms as 'deemen' and 'thinken,' such colloquialisms as the pronominal possessive, need not be too severely criticized. What goes far towards justifying Jonson's acrimony is the wanton confusion of different dialectal forms; the indiscriminate use for the mere sake of archaism of such variants as 'gate' beside ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... form of expression adopted by the savage, as in "Water, give me," is the simplest type of the approximate arrangement. In pleonasms, which are comparatively prevalent among the uneducated, the same essential structure is seen; as, for instance, in—"The men, they were there." Again, the old possessive case—"The king, his crown," conforms to the like order of thought. Moreover, the fact that the indirect mode is called the natural one, implies that it is the one spontaneously employed by the common people: that is—the one easiest for ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... appetite that wrought confusion. If he had loved us for our dinners we could have paid with our dinners, and it would have been a great economy of finer matter. I make free in these connexions with the plural possessive because if I was never able to do what the Mulvilles did, and people with still bigger houses and simpler charities, I met, first and last, every demand of reflexion, of emotion—particularly perhaps those of gratitude and of resentment. ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... sofa in the corner, leaving Milly seated there; but Mr. Toovey made his way straight to Miss Flaxman, without a glance to right or left, and bending over her before he seated himself at her side, fixed upon her a patronizing, a possessive smile which would have made some girls long for a barbarous freedom in the matter of face-slapping. But Milly Flaxman was meek. She took Archibald Toovey's seriousness for depth, and as his attentions had become unmistakable, had several times lain awake at night ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... generally in the possessive case; examples are "Santa Ana's house," "Santa Maria's umbrella," "San Jose's canes." Less commonly the names of other Bible worthies occur; thus "Adam's hair." There is not always any evident fitness in the ...
— A Little Book of Filipino Riddles • Various
... asked Adelaide. This was almost war. Mrs. Baxter was a regal and possessive widow from Baltimore whose long and regular visits to Mr. Lanley had once occasioned his family some alarm, though time had now given them a ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... tiptoe, like a dancer who studies her steps, without soiling her white stockings with a single speck of mud. The manolas of Madrid, the cigaretas of Seville in their satin slippers are not better shod; mine—pardon the anticipation of this possessive pronoun—put forward from under the seat an irreproachable boot and aristocratically turned ankle. If she would give me that graceful buskin to place in my museum beside the shoe of Carlotta Grisi, the Princess Houn-Gin's boot and Gracia of Grenada's slipper, I would fill it with ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... the party came in to take the long, flower-trimmed table. Worth's back was to the room; I saw them over his shoulder, in the lead a tall blonde, very smartly dressed, but not in evening clothes; in severe, exclusive street wear. The man with her, good looking, almost her own type, had that possessive air which seems somehow unmistakable—and there was a look about the half dozen companions after them, as they settled themselves in a great flurry of scraping chairs, that made me murmur ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... after Shirley had gone to bed David sat thinking of the episode. One of the little criticisms, quite definite now, lingered: a suspicion that Shirley's words were not always pearls of wisdom, that her attitude was a little too possessive, her demands upon his time and thought and scanty store of money a trifle less than reasonable sometimes. Sternly he crushed ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... the spot, "The Mermaid's Cove," but this possessive designation was merely complimentary, for so far were we from renouncing the cove in favour of the mermaids, that from the day on which we discovered it, it became one of ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... between words having a close syntactical relation, particularly if the initial vowel of the second word is in a constituent syllable. It may occur between the article and its substantive, the possessive adjective and its substantive, a preposition and its object, the negatives no and ni and a following vowel; and after the conjunctions y, que, si, and other words having a weak accent such as desde, coma, ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... that a letter or letters are left out; as, O'er, for over; 't is, for it is. It also denotes the possessive ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... in the saddle, he leisurely looked her over with eyes that smoldered behind half-shuttered lids. To most of her world she was in spirit still more boy than woman, but before his bold, possessive gaze her long lashes wavered to the cheeks into which the warm blood was beating. Her long, free lines were still slender with the immaturity of youth, her soul still hesitating reluctantly to cross the border to womanhood toward which ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... These possessive pronouns, meus, tuus, suus, noster, and vester, take after them these genitive cases,— ipsius, of himself, solius, of him alone, unius, of one, duorum, of two, trium, of three, &c., omnium, of all, plurium, of more, paucorum, of few, cujusque, of every one, and also the genitive cases ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... none is more quaint and delightful than Old St. John's Cemetery at the very core of the town, with streets of quiet, old-time houses on two sides, and busy, bustling, modern thoroughfares on the others. Every citizen of Kingsport feels a thrill of possessive pride in Old St. John's, for, if he be of any pretensions at all, he has an ancestor buried there, with a queer, crooked slab at his head, or else sprawling protectively over the grave, on which all the main facts of his history are recorded. For the ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Saturday, February 17th, Chamberlain dined with the Prince of Wales. In noting the invitation in my diary I put down: "The Prince of Wales has asked Chamberlain to dinner for Saturday. I call this 'nobbling my party.'" But the possessive pronoun with regard to the party was not according to my custom. We always said that the party consisted of three in all—two leaders and a follower—and Dillwyn acknowledged Chamberlain and myself ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... the love of a parent for a child this is the only human love which is outward-looking and centrifugal in its gaze; and even in the case of the love of a mother there is often something possessive and indrawing. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... stopped to kiss and say good night as usual, but the excitement of a new experience had stirred Caroline's emotions, and Wilf's pride in her had also roused the possessive instinct in him, so that the kiss they exchanged was a little different from the almost passionless salute to which they had long grown accustomed. Wilf's eyes shone and Caroline's cheeks were flushed when they drew back from each other. ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... was in reality named 'Nicholas Gabrini, the son of Lawrence'; and 'Lawrence,' being in Italian abbreviated to 'Rienzo' and preceded by the possessive particle 'of,' formed the patronymic by which the man is best known in our language. Lawrence Gabrini kept a wine-shop somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Cenci palace; he seems to have belonged to Anagni, he ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... and how much it involves, seem half-hearted and cold. Those who preach this doctrine remind us—and very justly—of the weakness and insincerity of the "orthodox" moral standard, whether it is enforced by law or by custom. They revolt against the proprietary and possessive view of marriage as giving a woman "a hold over her husband" when he has "grown tired of her," or as justifying a man in enforcing upon his wife the rights which only love makes right, when she has grown tired of ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... dowered each other with mutual safety, the lady who gave the assent for him saw in a dream the marvellous fruit which was to proceed from him and from his heirs;[4] and in order that he might be spoken of as he was,[5] a spirit went forth from here[6] to name him with the possessive of Him whose he wholly was. Dominic[7] he was called; and I speak of him as of the husbandman whom Christ elected to his garden to assist him. Truly he seemed the messenger and familiar of Christ; for the first love that was manifest in him was for the first counsel ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... value. This, if true, made plain the difficulty of re-sale, and made him think decidedly unpleasant things of "Lewis and Company, Specialists in B.C. Timber." The second was that someone, within recent years, had cut timber on his limit. And it was his timber. The possessive sense was fairly strong in Hollister, as it usually is in men who have ever possessed any considerable property. He did not like the idea of being cheated or robbed. In this case there was superficial evidence that both these ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... resentment swept through her; the patronage in his tone, the indefinable suggestion of possession was, she thought, uncalled for. That he should approve of Frank in that possessive manner was not far removed from ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... doubt that this possessive clinging to things is one of the most harmful habits in the life. Because it is so natural it is rarely recognized for the evil that it is; ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... addressed). interj., interjection. interr., interrogative. metath., metathesis. n., noun. na, marks a noun as taking the suffixed pronoun in the third singular only. neg., negative. neut., neuter. obj., object. part., particle. partic., participle. pers., person, personal. pl., plural. poss., possessive. pr., pronoun. pref., prefix. prep., preposition. S, Sa'a language. See Sa'a and Ulawa dictionary. sing., singular. sub., subject. suff., suffix, suffixed. term., termination. tr., transitive. U, Ulawa language. See Sa'a and Ulawa ...
— Grammar and Vocabulary of the Lau Language • Walter G. Ivens
... Irene, never, as the reader may possibly have observed, present, except through the senses of other characters, is a concretion of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world. ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger
... consuming fire of his ardent gaze, and in the fierce embrace that was drawing her shaking limbs closer and closer against the man's own pulsating body. She writhed in his arms as he crushed her to him in a sudden access of possessive passion. His head bent slowly down to her, his eyes burned deeper, and, held immovable, she endured the first kiss she had ever received. And the touch of his scorching lips, the clasp of his arms, the close union with his warm, strong body robbed her of ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... just entering a station, and a moment later their compartment was invaded by a commonplace couple preoccupied with the bestowal of bulging packages. Anna, at their approach, felt the possessive pride of the woman in love when strangers are between herself and the man she loves. She asked Darrow to open the window, to place her bag in the net, to roll her rug into a cushion for her feet; and while he was thus busied with her she was conscious of a new devotion ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... Betty did not "waste" any time that night over home-lessons. How can the beginner of a great singer be expected to care whether the pronoun "that" in "I dare do all 'that' may become a man," is relative or possessive? or whether Smyrna is the capital of Turkey or Japan? or even whether the Red Sea has to do ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... dative of reference is often used in Latin where we should use a possessive in English. Translate here as if the ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... bringing me: that, you know, I both welcome and wish for. But, as to the rest, the world has supplied me with a feeling against jewelry as a love-symbol. Look abroad and you will see: it is too possessive, too much like "chains of office"—the fair one is to wear her radiant harness before the world, that other women may be envious and the desire of her master's eye be satisfied! ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... bringing to Guy Landers a new Heaven and a new earth. Already the prosy old university town had begun to assume an atmosphere of home. The well-clipped campus, with its huge oaks and its limestone walks, had taken on the familiar possessive plural "our campus," and the solitary red squirrel which sported fearlessly in its midst had likewise become "our squirrel." The imposing, dignified college buildings had ceased to elicit open-mouthed observance, and among the student-body surnames had yielded precedence ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... is good hackish style to write a digit sequence where you intend the reader to understand the text string that names that number in English. So, hackers prefer to write '1970s' rather than 'nineteen-seventies' or '1970's' (the latter looks like a possessive). ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... kunhelpanto. Hem borderi. Hem bordero. Hemisphere duonsfero. Hemorrhage sangado. Hemorrhoids hemorojdo. Hemp kanabo. Hen (fowl) kokino. Henbane hiskiamo. Hence de nun. Henceforth de nun. Hepatic hepata. Heptagon sepangulo. Her sxin. Her (possessive) sxia. Hers sxia. Herald heroldo. Heraldic heraldika. Heraldry (science) heraldiko. Heraldry blazono. Herb herbo. Herbalist herbovendisto. Herbivorous herbomangxanta. Herd brutaro. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... him but a holiday exhibition—the march of an army, the exhilaration of a spectacle; the court as a banquet—the throne, the best seat at the entertainment. The life of the heir-apparent, to the life of the king possessive, is as the distinction between ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Englishman in love that is not to be mistaken. It is a subtle thing, and expresses itself neither in word nor deed in its earlier stages of development; but it is there all the same, and the combination of this possessive mood, with a certain shyness which often goes with it, ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... to mention That this erudition sham Is but classical pretension, The result of steady "cram." Yet my classic love aggressive, If you'll pardon the possessive, Is exceedingly impressive ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... allusion to her young cousin, the architect, the effect was the same on Charity. The hemlock garland she was wearing fell to her knees and she sat in a kind of trance. It was so manifestly absurd that Miss Hatchard should talk of Harney in that familiar possessive way, as if she had any claim on him, or knew anything about him. She, Charity Royall, was the only being on earth who really knew him, knew him from the soles of his feet to the rumpled crest of his hair, knew the ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... himself, there could be no doubt that he had reached the stage of entire subjugation. His whole bearing was instinct with possessive pride, his strong, bronzed features softened into a beautiful tenderness as he watched the flickering colour in Elma's cheeks, and smiled encouragement into her eyes. He had a good face; a trifle arrogant and self-satisfied, ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... different from that given in his "Native Calendar," above mentioned. In the former he says uotan "is from the pure Maya root word tan, which means primarily 'the breast,' or that which is in the front or in the middle of the body; with the possessive prefix it becomes utan. In Tzental this word means both 'breast' and 'heart.'" It must be admitted that these explanations are apparently somewhat strained, yet it is possible they are substantially correct, as they ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas
... helio-room, Snap and I stood with Moa's weapon upon us. Miko held Anita. Triumphant. Possessive. Then as she struggled, a gentleness came to this strange Martian giant. Perhaps he really loved her. Looking back on it, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... for the most part, words used instead of nouns. They may be arranged under the following divisions: Personal, Possessive, Relative, Demonstrative, ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... "The ... characteristics of the poetry are the use of archaic forms and words, such as mec for m, the possessive sn, gamol, dgor, swt for eald, dg, bld, etc., after they had become obsolete in the prose language, and the use of special compounds and phrases, such as hildendre (war-adder) for 'arrow,' gold-gifa (gold-giver) for 'king,' ... goldwine gumena (goldfriend of men, distributor ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... and farms, we may plough and sow and reap, we may make revolutions or wars, sending our armies marching through the countryside in creeping dusty columns, but we are only illusions on the page of history, shadows flitting across the face of the land; the rooks are perpetual, ineradicable, and possessive. They feed behind our plough; they flock in our green trees; they build in our valleys and in the shelter of our houses; summer and winter they are seen flying under our English skies; they mate and nest ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... person and case. There are two forms of the dual and plural in the first person. The following table shows the nominative and possessive cases: ...
— The Gundungurra Language • R. H. Mathews
... persons on the stage give offence in the pronunciation of the pronoun possessive MY—speaking it in all cases with the full open Y, as it would rhyme to fly, which should only be when it is put in contradistinction to thy or his, or any other pronoun possessive: in all other cases it should be sounded like me. This is a pure Americanism, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... with her aunt, carefully dressed in spotless, diaphanous tunic, fresh flowers in her hair, a treasured pink silk garter clasping her rounded arm. "Big White Brother," she called me with pride, though often I saw a sad wonder in her great eyes as she squatted near, silently watching me. Her possessive ways were pretty to see as she walked close by my side on the trail from my cabin to the beach, while Exploding Eggs regarded her jealously, insisting on his prerogative as Tueni Oki Kiki, Keeper of the Golden Bed, the glittering ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... settlement. But though the geographical work done in this region was important and of good quality—Freycinet being on the spot—it does not appear that any investigations were made beyond those natural to a scientific expedition, and certainly no steps were taken by Baudin to assert possessive rights. Yet there was no part of Australia as to which the French could have made out stronger claims on moral grounds; for though the voyage of the first French navigator who landed in Tasmania was one ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... School Teachers are informed that anybody else's is correct."—"New York Times," Sunday, July 31, 1881. An English writer says: "In such phrases as anybody else, and the like, else is often put in the possessive case; as, 'anybody else's servant'; and some grammarians defend this use of the possessive case, arguing that somebody else is a compound noun." It is better grammar and more euphonious to consider else as being an adjective, and to form the possessive by adding the apostrophe and s to the ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... summarised, further and further, in the dim fire-dust of endless avenues; that was all of the essence of fond and thrilled and throbbing recognition, with a thousand things understood and a flood of response conveyed, a whole familiar possessive feeling ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... she, laying a strong accent on the pronoun possessive. "Only see what rights and privileges the gentleman is usurping! We live in a free country, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... n' alo, your own name, which I know; namul' ul i, my own name. These suggest that the true possessive ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... inflections, or on the distinctions of the genders. Only under Edward III. and Richard II. were the main principles established upon which English grammar rests. As happened also for the vocabulary, in certain exceptional cases the French and the Saxon uses have been both preserved. The possessive case, for instance, can be expressed either by means of a proposition, in French fashion: "The works of Shakespeare," or by means of the ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... it occurs with substantives only, and that only in the expression of number. Thus, although the plural of substantives like axis and genius are Latin, the possessive cases are English. So also are the degrees of comparison for adjectives, like circular, and the tenses, ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... upon him. In their black depths his touch had roused a passion which was by no means all tenderness. There was in it something threatening, something intensely and inordinately possessive. "That means that you didn't think me good-looking at all, as compared with—Chloe?" ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the colour of the flesh was the same—as though light shone through alabaster—and the sweetness of the deep-set eyes. Moreover she had produced much the same effect on the bystander, as of a child of nature, a creature of impulse and passion—passion, clinging and self-devoted, not fierce and possessive—through all the more superficial suggestions of reticence and self-control. 'This little creature is only at the beginning of her life'—he thought, with a kind of pity for her very softness and exquisiteness. 'What the deuce will she have made of ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... wrote again and again to Deering, entreating him for a word, for a mere sign of life. From the first she had shrunk from seeming to assert any claim on his future, yet in her aching bewilderment she now charged herself with having been too possessive, too exacting in her tone. She told herself that his fastidiousness shrank from any but a "light touch," and that hers had not been light enough. She should havekept to the character of the "little friend," the artless consciousness ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... hands, one after the other, with a possessive tenderness that told her better than words, that he had not resigned ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... when a possible, nay, a probable chance, might for ever have blasted his ambitious hopes, he for the first time spoke of France as his. Considering the circumstances in which we then stood, this use of the possessive pronoun "my" describes more forcibly than anything that can be said the flashes of divination which crossed Bonaparte's brain when he was wrapped up in his chimerical ideas of ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... the possessive noun, which belongs to another word, but is still a noun. They may be regarded as elliptical expressions, meaning a walk in the morning, a bank in New York, a bill as to tax ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... not alone the only unity in us, but it is that which unifies all the rest, uses the "possessive case," and may subordinate all else ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... her heart swelled and opened wide to a conception of something greater and deeper in motherhood than she had had; but which she could have if she could deserve it; something so wide and sun-flooded that the old selfish, possessive, never-satisfied ache which had called itself love withered away, its power to hurt and ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... books, newspapers, magazines, magazine articles, poems, plays, pictures, etc.: that is, the first word and all other words except articles, demonstratives, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, relative pronouns, and other pronouns in the possessive case. A the preceding the title of a newspaper or a magazine is regarded as part of ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... Potomac begins at or near its traditional source, the tiny Appalachian spring at the head of the North Branch where in 1746 Thomas Lord Fairfax's surveyors set an inscribed stone to mark the northwestern corner of that possessive nobleman's vast holdings. Abandoned strip coal mines lie within sight of the spot, and it is doubtful that the infant river trickles more than a few yards before receiving its first injection of the acidic mixture ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... a noun to a verb, to another noun, or to a preposition is called its case. There are three cases called the nominative, objective, and possessive. When the noun does something it is in the nominative case and is called the subject of ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... p pannan. The definite form may be used thus instead of the possessive when there ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... accompanying discipline of the primitive instincts, which are needed not only for the development of civilisation in general, but in particular of the home. Domineering egotism, the assertion of greedy possessive rights, are out of place in the modern home. They are just as mischievous when exhibited by the wife as by the husband. We have seen, as we look back, the futility in the end of the ancient structure ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... ruling Forsyte instinct, Soames wants a son who will keep together and even increase his great possessions, while continuing his personality. The expiring generation, represented by James, is urgent upon this duty to the family. You may imagine what Mr. GALSWORTHY makes of it all. These possessive persons, with their wealth, their hatred and affections and their various strongholds in the more eminently desirable parts of residential London, affect one like portions of some monstrous stone-fronted edifice, impressive but repellent. I have some curiosity to see, with Mr. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... now account for what has hitherto puzzled all grammarians, namely, the double possessive. This book of John's means, this book of all John's; that is, this book forming a part of all John's, of all things belonging ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... AB signifies "father," and was among the Hebrews a title of honor. From it, by the addition of the possessive pronoun, is compounded the word Abif, signifying "his father," and applied to ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... theory, the collective property of a clan or of a family, but in practice anyone may help himself. However, the finder becomes sole and exclusive owner of a bee's nest as soon as he sets up an indication of his ownership in the form of a split stick with a small crosspiece, and announces his possessive rights on his return to the settlement. The parted trunk has a form and significance similar to that which it has in connection with the selection of a new site. As far as I know a bee's nest once located by one individual is seldom appropriated by another, but the theft of palm ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... the polite forms mean "yours." To translate these terms, "my foolish wife," "my swinish son," is incorrect, because it twice translates the same word. In such cases the Japanese thought is best expressed by using the possessive pronoun and omitting the derogative adjective altogether. Japanese indirect methods for the expression of the personal relation are thus numberless and subtile. May it not be plausibly argued since the European has only a few blunt ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... began to wear rather threadbare, while the practical inconveniences and restrictions it imposed increasingly disclosed themselves. A lover, as Helen reflected, provided you see enough of him, offers but small improvement upon a husband. He is liable to become possessive and didactic, after the manner of the natural man. He is liable to forget that the relation is permitted, not legalised—that it exists on suffrance merely, and is therefore terminable at the will of either party. The last days of that same southern ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... erected his wigwam there during this winter and spring of 1651-52, thus giving it a distinctive appellation, an island in the Long Island sound off Westport, Conn., near the mouth of the Saugatuck river, bears his name in the possessive as "Cockenoe's Island" to this day, as will be noted by consulting a Coast Survey chart. That the name was bestowed in his time is proven by the record "that it was agreed (in 1672) that the said ...
— John Eliot's First Indian Teacher and Interpreter Cockenoe-de-Long Island and The Story of His Career from the Early Records • William Wallace Tooker
... emptied, and she was free to do so, Hepsey, accompanied by the possessive Jonathan, found her way over to the Maxwells. Before she started to tell them the results of the meeting she cast a glance of whimsical affection at her ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... may possibly be only a variation of the term above. We are told by Orus Apollo, that the basilisk, or royal serpent, was named Oubaios: [186][Greek: Oubaios, ho estin Hellenisti Basiliskos]. It should have been rendered [Greek: Oubos], Oubus; for [Greek: Oubaios] is a possessive, and not a proper name. The Deity, so denominated, was esteemed prophetic; and his temples were applied to as oracular. This idolatry is alluded to by Moses,[187] who, in the name of God, forbids the ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... to audience.) And again I wish to mention That this erudition sham Is but classical pretension, The result of steady "cram." Yet my classic lore aggressive (If you'll pardon the possessive) Is exceedingly impressive When you're ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... Perfected, he would never use them, and his sentences would flow untaught from his pen in absolutely clear reflection of his thought. As an example of what I mean by awkwardnesses, I would cite the use of "whose" as the possessive of "which." I know that adequate authority pronounces this correct, so it is not on that score I reject it. Moreover, I recognize that in myself the repulsion is somewhat of an acquired taste. When I began to write I thus employed it myself, but its sound is so ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... wanted before. At the thought, he flushed with the idea that the portrait's eyes were reading his face, and compelled himself to look bravely at it; but as he met the lovely eyes strange questions darted into his brain: whether he would not rather have been solely to blame; whether his all-possessive love of her would not be more flawless now if she had been a flawless eternal-feminine type, longing for motherhood, but denying it for his sake; whether he would not be happier now in looking at her portrait if some warm tint from a Renaissance Madonna had mellowed ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... considered it," answered the deacon. "Captain Gar'ner volunteered to go across for the doctor in my boat—" with a heavy emphasis on the possessive pronoun—"and we had him to look at the patient. But, if the salt-water be good for consumptive people, as some pretend, I think there is generally little hope for seamen whose lungs ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... a poor man. "A man's life," He said, "consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth." And the best commentary on the saying is just His own life; for He had nothing. There is something very suggestive in Christ's use of the little possessive pronoun "My." We know how we use the word. Listen to the rich man in the parable: "My fruits," "my barns," "my corn," "my goods." Now listen to Christ. He says: "My Father," "My Church," "My friends," "My disciples"; but He never says "My house," "My lands," "My books." The one perfect life ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... for number, person and case. There are two forms of the dual and plural in the first person. The following table shows the nominative and possessive cases: ...
— The Gundungurra Language • R. H. Mathews
... The demonstrative and possessive personal pronouns are alike in form, and, as in other American languages, are intimately incorporated with the words with which they are construed. A single letter is the root of each: d I, mine, b ...
— The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations • Daniel G. Brinton
... a possible, nay, a probable chance, might for ever have blasted his ambitious hopes, he for the first time spoke of France as his. Considering the circumstances in which we then stood, this use of the possessive pronoun "my" describes more forcibly than anything that can be said the flashes of divination which crossed Bonaparte's brain when he was wrapped up in his chimerical ideas ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... is Tommy's opinion. In the Yorkshire dialect, when the possessive case is followed by the relative substantive, it is customary to omit the S; but if the relative be understood, and not expressed, the possessive case is formed in the usual manner, as in a subsequent line ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... to the vehicle of its expression. Although our pronouns are still declined, the sole inflection of our nouns, with the exception of a few like ox, oxen, or mouse, mice, is the addition of 's, s, or es for the possessive and the plural. Modern German, on the other hand, still retains these troublesome case endings. How did English have the good fortune ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... noticed: (1.) The article an, from which the n was dropped before words beginning with a consonant sound, is often found in old books where a would be more proper; as, an heart, an help, an hill, an one, an use. (2.) Till the seventeenth century, the possessive case was written without the apostrophe; being formed at different times, in es, is, ys, or s, like the plural; and apparently without rule or uniformity in respect to the doubling of the final consonant: as Goddes, Godes, Godis, Godys, or Gods, for God's; so mannes, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... particular advantage possessed by the Teutonic over the Romance languages in idiomatic clearness and precision it is that conferred by their ownership of a possessive case, almost the sole remaining monument to the fact that our ancestors spoke an inflected tongue. That we should still be able to speak of "the baker's wife's dog" instead of "the dog of the wife of the baker" certainly should be regarded by English-speaking people as a precious birthright. ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... call him, was in reality named 'Nicholas Gabrini, the son of Lawrence'; and 'Lawrence,' being in Italian abbreviated to 'Rienzo' and preceded by the possessive particle 'of,' formed the patronymic by which the man is best known in our language. Lawrence Gabrini kept a wine-shop somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Cenci palace; he seems to have belonged to Anagni, he was therefore by birth a retainer ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... terms &c. (contract) 769; submit to arbitration, abide by arbitration; patch up, bridge over, arrange; straighten out, adjust, differences, agree; make the best of, make a virtue of necessity; take the will for the deed. % Section IV. POSSESSIVE RELATIONS <— That is, relations which concern ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... noun to a verb, to another noun, or to a preposition is called its case. There are three cases called the nominative, objective, and possessive. When the noun does something it is in the nominative case and is called the ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... did not "waste" any time that night over home-lessons. How can the beginner of a great singer be expected to care whether the pronoun "that" in "I dare do all 'that' may become a man," is relative or possessive? or whether Smyrna is the capital of Turkey or Japan? or even whether the Red Sea has to do with ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... possessive noun, which belongs to another word, but is still a noun. They may be regarded as elliptical expressions, meaning a walk in the morning, a bank in New York, a bill as to tax on ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... fear of God into Elinor Piper, whatever Ted may say about it, and wondering how the latter would take a suggestion to come over to Melgrove for a while instead of starting an immoral existence with that beautiful but possessive friend of Louise's, he ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... The possessive case of nouns is formed, in the singular number, by adding to the nominative s preceded by an apostrophe; and, in the plural, when the nominative ends in s, by adding an apostrophe only: as, singular, boy's; plural, boys';—sounded ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the position of the possessive sign in such words as "men's," "writer's." If accurately placed, the writer may be presumed to understand punctuation, and will give evidence of it ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... indolence was conquered by my love of power: I supported the contest; the affair came before our grand jury: I conquered, and Mr. Hardcastle was ever after, of course, my enemy. To English ears the possessive pronouns my and his may sound extraordinary, prefixed to a justice of peace; but, in many parts of Ireland, this language is perfectly correct. A great man talks of making a justice of the peace with perfect confidence; a very great man talks ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... himself. However, the finder becomes sole and exclusive owner of a bee's nest as soon as he sets up an indication of his ownership in the form of a split stick with a small crosspiece, and announces his possessive rights on his return to the settlement. The parted trunk has a form and significance similar to that which it has in connection with the selection of a new site. As far as I know a bee's nest once located by one individual is seldom appropriated by another, but the ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... in to take the long, flower-trimmed table. Worth's back was to the room; I saw them over his shoulder, in the lead a tall blonde, very smartly dressed, but not in evening clothes; in severe, exclusive street wear. The man with her, good looking, almost her own type, had that possessive air which seems somehow unmistakable—and there was a look about the half dozen companions after them, as they settled themselves in a great flurry of scraping chairs, that made me ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... Calendar," above mentioned. In the former he says uotan "is from the pure Maya root word tan, which means primarily 'the breast,' or that which is in the front or in the middle of the body; with the possessive prefix it becomes utan. In Tzental this word means both 'breast' and 'heart.'" It must be admitted that these explanations are apparently somewhat strained, yet it is possible they are substantially correct, as they appear to ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas
... hand-to-mouth. He had fine gross easy senses, but it was not his good-natured appetite that wrought confusion. If he had loved us for our dinners we could have paid with our dinners, and it would have been a great economy of finer matter. I make free in these connexions with the plural possessive because if I was never able to do what the Mulvilles did, and people with still bigger houses and simpler charities, I met, first and last, every demand of reflexion, of emotion—particularly perhaps ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... Zeitoon was grinning at us through a small square window in the wall at one end of the veranda. Then he came round and once more vaulted the veranda rail, for he seemed to hold ordinary means of entry in contempt. His eye looked very possessive for that of one seeking employment as a guide, but he stood at respectful attention until ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... the rain, the possessive grayness, which troubled his body to-night, and through his body troubled his spirit. His nostrils inhaled the damp, and it seemed to go straight into his essence, into the mystery that was he. His eyes saw no more blue, and it was as if they ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... over which one can exercise ownership can be conjugated by possessive suffixes for ...
— The Gundungurra Language • R. H. Mathews
... business letters): "Sinjoro, Sinjorino, Estimata Sinjoro, Karaj Sinjoroj, Tre estimata Frauxlino," etc.; (to friends and relatives) "Kara Frauxlino, Karaj Gefratoj, Kara Amiko, Kara Mario, Patrino mia," (placing the possessive adjective after the noun in this way gives an affectionate sense, as in English "Mother mine," etc) etc.; (to persons whose opinions on some subject are known to agree with those of the writer) "Estimata (Kara) Samideano" ("follower of the ...
— A Complete Grammar of Esperanto • Ivy Kellerman
... they regarded her, had in them a smile that the girl instinctively resented. Was it a shade too possessive and complacently ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... any apparent curiosity about it. Betty, who sometimes rebelled at remaining so scrupulously incognita, defiantly took the limelight at intervals and moved among the assembled guests with an authoritative and possessive air, adjusting and rearranging small details, and acknowledging the presence of habitues, but since her attentions were popularly supposed to be those of a superior head waitress, she soon tired of ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... with perceptible emphasis on the possessive, "doesn't believe that cigarettes are good ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... he would never use them, and his sentences would flow untaught from his pen in absolutely clear reflection of his thought. As an example of what I mean by awkwardnesses, I would cite the use of "whose" as the possessive of "which." I know that adequate authority pronounces this correct, so it is not on that score I reject it. Moreover, I recognize that in myself the repulsion is somewhat of an acquired taste. When I began to write I thus employed it myself, but its sound is so inevitably suggestive ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... an emotional temperament. All that was outer was fascinating, all that was inner suggested coldness. After experience assured me that all who came to know her shared this estimate, even in those days when every man on the ship was willing to be her slave. She had a compelling atmosphere, a possessive presence; and yet her mind at this time was unemotional—like Octavia, the wife of Mark Antony, "of a cold conversation." She was striking and unusual in appearance, and yet well within convention ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... curious, and none is more quaint and delightful than Old St. John's Cemetery at the very core of the town, with streets of quiet, old-time houses on two sides, and busy, bustling, modern thoroughfares on the others. Every citizen of Kingsport feels a thrill of possessive pride in Old St. John's, for, if he be of any pretensions at all, he has an ancestor buried there, with a queer, crooked slab at his head, or else sprawling protectively over the grave, on which all the main facts of his history are recorded. For the most part ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... most decidedly!" she returned, without repudiating the possessive pronoun. "It doesn't follow that I think anything of him—apart from what you did between ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... Rich Hilary. Until Allys came on the scene it had seemed the pursuit must be successful. They had gone abroad on the same steamer the year before, dawdled through a London season, and come home simultaneously—he rather bored and languid, she of a demure and downcast, but withal possessive, air. She had said they were not engaged—"oh, dear no, only excellent friends," but looking all the while a contradiction of the words. Then unwisely she had taken Hilary to that tiresome tea for the little Rhett girl—and behold! the mischief ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... invariably sounds like l, so that the word "rice" he pronounces "lice"—a bit of information which may prevent an unpleasant apprehension when you come to employ a Chinese cook. He rejects the English personal pronoun I, and uses the possessive "my" in its place; thus, "My go home," in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... the church with what was almost a possessive eye. These people were his friends. He knew them all, and they knew him. They had, against his protest, put his name on the bronze tablet set in the wall on the roll of honor. Small as it was, this ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and the Book," and in so many of the later poems. These inexcusable violations are like the larvae within certain vegetable growths: soon or late they will destroy their environment before they perish themselves. Though possessive above all others of that science of the percipient in the allied arts of painting and music, wherein he found the unconventional Shelley so missuaded by convention, he seemed ever more alert to the substance than to the manner of poetry. In a letter of Mrs. ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... reacting upon those about her, gained both for herself and her opinions a degree of consideration to which she was unaccustomed and which she highly relished. Never had Serena presented so bold a front to her philanthropic and very possessive elder sister. Never had she enjoyed so much attention in the small and rigidly select circle of Slowby society, in which she and Miss Susan moved. Serena spoke with authority upon all subjects, on the strength of a purely fictitious ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... who preach this doctrine remind us—and very justly—of the weakness and insincerity of the "orthodox" moral standard, whether it is enforced by law or by custom. They revolt against the proprietary and possessive view of marriage as giving a woman "a hold over her husband" when he has "grown tired of her," or as justifying a man in enforcing upon his wife the rights which only love makes right, when she has ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... more to Flora's subtlety and diligence. It refreshed Madame to see how well the fair strategist kept her purposes hid. Not even Irby called them—those he discerned—hers. In any case, at any time, any possessive but my or mine, or my or mine on any lip but his, angered him. Wise Flora, whenever she alluded to their holding of the plighted ones apart, named the scheme his till that cloyed, and then "ours" in a way that made it more richly his, even when—clearly to Madame, ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... had kept the stalwart virtues of the Scotch bourgeoisie, and was—"decent"; there were the two native lairds that reminded him of "parts of speech," one being distinctly alluded to as a definite article, and the other being "of" something, and apparently governed always by that possessive case. There were two or three "workers"—men of power and ability in their several vocations; indeed, there was the general over-proportion of intellect, characteristic of such Scotch gatherings, and often in excess of minor social qualities. There was the usual foreigner, with Latin quickness, ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... her wistfully. The bow-legged range-rider was in no hurry to have her go. She was the first girl who had ever looked twice at him, the first one he had ever taken out or talked nonsense with or been ordered about by in the possessive fashion used by the modern young woman. Hence he was head ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... the mercilessly honest hand of youth. Esther's eyes were quite dry now. Her nervousness was passing. Regret and pity were merged in one overpowering, instinctive desire: the desire to show him beyond all manner of doubt that she repudiated that possessive touch upon her hand. "I could not ever possibly marry you," she said, as calmly as if she had been accustomed to dismissing ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... no, not my name, I feel sure.' He accentuated the possessive pronoun strongly, and then proceeded to explain the accentuation, smiling more and more amiably as he did so. 'No, not my name; my brother's—my ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... pleasure; the tumult of the camp was to him but a holiday exhibition—the march of an army, the exhilaration of a spectacle; the court as a banquet—the throne, the best seat at the entertainment. The life of the heir-apparent, to the life of the king possessive, is as the distinction between enchanting hope and ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book II. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Chamberlain dined with the Prince of Wales. In noting the invitation in my diary I put down: "The Prince of Wales has asked Chamberlain to dinner for Saturday. I call this 'nobbling my party.'" But the possessive pronoun with regard to the party was not according to my custom. We always said that the party consisted of three in all—two leaders and a follower—and Dillwyn acknowledged Chamberlain and ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... she has lost her interrogation point. At the day of Pentecost people were saying, "What do these things mean?" To-day they never think of saying it. I have been told in a little pamphlet issued by an English writer that the church has lost her possessive case, which means that somehow she has gone on without realizing that the risen, glorified Christ is her blessed Lord. It is a great thing to say "Jesus"; infinitely greater is it to say "My Jesus." The church has lost her imperative mode. In days that are past it was possible for the church to ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... tunic, fresh flowers in her hair, a treasured pink silk garter clasping her rounded arm. "Big White Brother," she called me with pride, though often I saw a sad wonder in her great eyes as she squatted near, silently watching me. Her possessive ways were pretty to see as she walked close by my side on the trail from my cabin to the beach, while Exploding Eggs regarded her jealously, insisting on his prerogative as Tueni Oki Kiki, Keeper of ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... of the genitive case, jong, is sometimes omitted for the sake of brevity, e.g. u ksew nga (my dog) for u ksew jong nga. The preposition la gives also the force of the possessive case, e.g. la ka jong ka jong (their own). There are some nouns which change their form, or rather are abbreviated when used in the vocative case, e.g. ko mei, not ko kmei Oh mother; ko pa, not ko kpa Oh father. These, however, ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... encroaching as human pride, it grasps in its conquering talons all that belongs to us; for we do not, in life, make any great difference between what is we and what is ours—an insult to our dog, our dwelling, or our work wounds us as much as an insult to ourselves. The possessive pronoun expresses both possession and possessor. In fact, we consider our body as ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... of Irene, never, as the reader may possibly have observed, present, except through the senses of other characters, is a concretion of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world. ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of John Galsworthy • John Galsworthy
... Milton's poems, Od. Nat. 106; Par. Lost, i. 254; Par. Lost, iv. 813: the word is found also in Lawes' dedication of Comus. The word does not occur in English at all until the end of the sixteenth century, the possessive case of the neuter pronoun it and of the masculine he being his. This gave rise to confusion when the old gender system decayed, and the form its gradually came into use, until, by the end of the seventeenth century, it was in general use. Milton, ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... itself in lazy heads, and, while it dwarfs every power to the level of its own littleness, keeps vociferating, "What a great man am I!" It is the essential vice of this glib imp of the mind, even when it infests large intellects, that it puts Nature in the possessive case,—labels all its inventions and discoveries "My truth,"—and moves about the realms of art, science, and letters in a constant fear of having its pockets picked. Think of a man's having vouchsafed to him one of those awful glimpses into the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... to a pronoun of the First and Second person, it is preceded by the Possessive case. But when it is added to a pronoun of the Third person, it is preceded by a ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... my life—and in the use, of the possessive pronoun here and elsewhere, let it signify also the life of my life-partner—is beyond the range of ordinary experience, since it is immune from the ferments which seethe and muddle the lives of the many, I am ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... say in plain terms, how much more eloquent they would be! Another rule is to avoid converting mere abstractions into persons. I believe you will very rarely find in any great writer before the Revolution the possessive case of an inanimate noun used in prose instead of the dependent case, as 'the watch's hand,' for 'the hand of the watch.' The possessive or Saxon genitive was confined to persons, or at least to animated subjects. ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... not wholly drive him from her side. It was observed by every man and woman who came in that evening how assiduous was Gleason in his attentions. More than that, there was something about them that can best be described by the word possessive. It seemed as though he had studied the art of behaving as though he felt that every look and word was welcome to her. Mrs. Stannard was secretly exasperated; Mrs. Truscott, who knew nothing of him until their westward journey, was only vaguely annoyed, but no one could tell from her ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... His bold, possessive eyes yielded no fraction of all they claimed. "Time enough for that, Sheba. Truth is that you're afraid to let yourself love me. You're worried because you can't measure me by the little two-by-four foot-rule you brought from Ireland ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... with prominent Adam's apple. Is attracted by large women, whom he dominates. Is assured, violent and jealous. Appetite fastidious. Takes sleeping powders during course of disease and uses telephone frequently to find out if the object of his affections is lunching with another man. Is extremely possessive as to women, and has had in early years a strong desire to take the other fellow's girl away from him. Is pugnacious and intelligent, but has moments of great tenderness and charm. Shows his worst side to the neighbors and breathes freely after nine ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... the usual idiomatic mode of expressing possession of parts of the body, wearing apparel, etc., by the use of the definite article instead of the possessive adjective his, her, etc., the dative pronoun also being often added to indicate the possessor, as: Yo me corte el dedo, ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... all the different persons. When these possessive pronouns are used with nouns, nearly all the syllables are omitted, except the first, which is added to the noun ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... rooms seemed to be waiting for the return of guests just gone out of them; not one of them but had an air of cheerful company. For once, as he walked through it, Aldous Raeburn spared the old house an affectionate possessive thought. Its size and wealth, with all that both implied, had often weighed upon him. To-night his breath quickened as he passed the range of family portraits leading to the library door. There was a vacant space here and there—"room for ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... there could be no doubt that he had reached the stage of entire subjugation. His whole bearing was instinct with possessive pride, his strong, bronzed features softened into a beautiful tenderness as he watched the flickering colour in Elma's cheeks, and smiled encouragement into her eyes. He had a good face; a trifle arrogant and self-satisfied, ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... day after the funeral that it all came out. Lena and Ethel were sitting up together over the papers and the letters, turning out his bureau. I suppose that, in the grand immunity his death conferred on her, poor Lena had become provokingly possessive. I can hear her saying to Ethel that there had never been anybody but her, all those years. Praising his faithfulness; holding out her dead happiness, and apologizing to Ethel for talking about it when Ethel didn't understand, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... type of the approximate arrangement. In pleonasms, which are comparatively prevalent among the uneducated, the same essential structure is seen; as, for instance, in—"The men, they were there." Again, the old possessive case—"The king, his crown," conforms to the like order of thought. Moreover, the fact that the indirect mode is called the natural one, implies that it is the one spontaneously employed by the common people: that is—the one ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... and Icsiris; but by the later Greeks the name was altered to Isiris and Osiris. And not only the God Sehor, or Sehoris was so expressed; but Cnas, or Canaan, had the same title, and was styled Uc-Cnas, and the Gentile name or possessive was Uc-cnaos, [Greek: Uk-knaos: to ethnikon gar Chnaos], as we learn from Stephanus. The Greeks, whose custom it was to reduce every foreign name to something similar in their own language, changed [Greek: Ukknaos] to [Greek: Kukneios], Uc Cnaus to Cucneus; and from [Greek: Uk Knas] formed [Greek: ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... ease in the saddle, he leisurely looked her over with eyes that smoldered behind half-shuttered lids. To most of her world she was in spirit still more boy than woman, but before his bold, possessive gaze her long lashes wavered to the cheeks into which the warm blood was beating. Her long, free lines were still slender with the immaturity of youth, her soul still hesitating reluctantly to cross the border ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... by, bringing to Guy Landers a new Heaven and a new earth. Already the prosy old university town had begun to assume an atmosphere of home. The well-clipped campus, with its huge oaks and its limestone walks, had taken on the familiar possessive plural "our campus," and the solitary red squirrel which sported fearlessly in its midst had likewise become "our squirrel." The imposing, dignified college buildings had ceased to elicit open-mouthed observance, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... can now account for what has hitherto puzzled all grammarians, namely, the double possessive. This book of John's means, this book of all John's; that is, this book forming a part of all John's, of all things ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... don't be joking. Now, decline He.' 'Nominative he, possessive his, objective him.' 'You see, his is possessive. Now, you can say his book, but you can't say him book.' 'Yes, I do say hymn book, too,' said the impracticable scholar, with a quizzical twinkle. Each one of ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... said: "My wife is here," and chose to seize her with possessive grasp, she must meekly fold her hands upon her breast, and say: "Even so, my lord. I am yours. Deal with me as ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... and sat beside him. Her face betokened satisfaction, and she looked at Gregorio with a possessive smile. She had gained her desire, and asked ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
