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Anachronism   /ənˈækrənˌɪzəm/   Listen
Anachronism

noun
1.
Something located at a time when it could not have existed or occurred.  Synonyms: misdating, mistiming.
2.
An artifact that belongs to another time.
3.
A person who seems to be displaced in time; who belongs to another age.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Anachronism" Quotes from Famous Books



... lifted his glass to Merle. "Tell me, dear lady, how does it feel to be married to an anachronism?" ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer

... should be frowned upon and listened to with impatience. The time for Border feud and skirmish was already well-nigh past. Industry and knowledge and the pacific arts of life were making progress. The moss-trooper was already becoming an anachronism and a pestilent nuisance, to be put down by the relentless arm of the law, before the Union of the Crowns. Half a century or more before that event, this opinion had been formed of the reiving clans by their quieter and more thoughtful neighbours, as is manifest from the biting allusions of ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie

... For example, Don Quixote is never set before us as a mere madman, but as the victim of a monomania, and that, when you analyze it, of a very noble kind—nothing less, indeed, than devotion to an unattainable ideal, to an anachronism, as the ideals of imaginative men for the most part are. Amid all his ludicrous defeats and disillusions, this poetical side of him is brought to our notice at intervals, just as a certain theme recurs again and again in one of Beethoven's symphonies, a ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell

... in the work of the much-abused Ibsen. The Pretenders is a historical drama amazingly rich in idea; whether the idea of kingship superbly handled in it is an anachronism it is hard to say, or to tell whether the dramatist chose his subject to illustrate his idea or the idea to embellish his subject; but in it, though obviously there is scope for magnificent mounting and interesting detail, one feels that the genius of the author has prevented him ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

... could so establish themselves for the years of their decline. There were others, many others, whose beauty had faded without an increase in wit, and these seemed to be serving their more fortunate sisters, both old and young, in various menial capacities. It was a strange anachronism in this world where men's more weighty affairs had been so perfectly socialized, to find woman retaining, evidently by men's permission, the individualistic right to exploit her ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings

... he knew, with his wife's question, that it was too late. Her arms, sweet and strangling, were around him, for he had made all such choices back in that room in the Plaza the year before. This was an anachronism from an age of ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... dramatically at the heavens, the other extended holding a reversed sword. It shows sincerity and faithful work, and had it been placed within the rotunda, would no doubt have been impressive and majestic. Where it stands, it is a hopeless anachronism. ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson

... "I am an anachronism," said the dragon, "don't you know what that is?—well, I am one born out of my age. I am a survival of anything but the fittest. You are the masters now, you miserable floppy-looking race of mankind. You can shoot me, you can blow me up with dynamite, you ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt

... announcement of a show with a hunt, awnings, and sprinklings of perfumed water. It was there that the Pompeians assembled to hear the news concerning the public shows and the rumors of the day. There they could read the dispatches from Rome. This is no anachronism, good reader, for newspapers were known to the ancients—see Leclerc's book—and they were called the diurnes or daily doings of the Roman people; diurnals and journals are two words belonging to ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier

... against over-elaboration, alike in food and the serving thereof. The very best decoration for a table is something good in the plates. This is not saying one should not plan to please the eye no less than the palate. But ribbon on sandwiches is an anachronism—so is all the flummery of silk and laces, doilies and doo-dads that so often bewilder us. They are unfair to the food—as hard to live up to as anybody's blue china. I smile even yet, remembering my husband's chuckles, after ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams

... corruption known as the Ottoman Empire, held together by no vital forces, was ready to fall into ruin at one vigorous touch. It was an anachronism in modern Europe, where its cruelty was only limited by its weakness. That such an odious, treacherous despotism should so strongly appeal to the sympathies of England that she was willing to enter upon a life-and-death struggle for its maintenance, ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele

... cloudless sky and glanced with blinding force off the road. Sir Thomas Boyd squinted at it through the rather incongruous sunglasses he was wearing, while Malone wondered idly if it was the sunglasses, or the rest of the world, that was an anachronism. But Sir Thomas kept his eyes grimly on the road as he gunned the powerful Lincoln toward the Yucca Flats Labs ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett

... to her following her experience with Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. It INTERESTED her, fascinated her. There was an atmosphere in the tremendous offices—a tension, a SNAPPINESS, an alertness, an efficiency that made Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, seem an anachronism; as belonging in an earlier, more leisurely, less capable century. There was a spirit among the workers totally lacking in her former place of employment; there was an attitude in superiors, and most notable in Malcolm Lightener himself, which was so different from that of Mr. Foote that ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland

... sort of dull capacity for routine work. Germany, the very heart of it eaten out with sentiment, either the cheap military or the vague socialist brand. Spain and Italy shadows, Denmark and Sweden farces, Turkey a sinful anachronism." ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan

... responsible for the trouble of which the tithes difficulty was only an incident. Already a party was forming itself in the House of Commons composed of intellectual and far-seeing men who recognized the fact that the Irish State Church was in its very principles an anomaly and an anachronism. On May 27, 1834, a debate on the whole question of the Irish State Church and its revenues was raised in the House of Commons by Mr. Henry Ward, one of the most advanced reformers and thoughtful politicians whom the new conditions of ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy

... Jusserand's English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages. If the Canterbury Pilgrims, led by jolly Harry Bailey, their host, had burst out from the woods, on horseback, singing and jesting, I should not have considered their appearance an anachronism.... ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp

... Court-rule—corresponded to the system of serfdom. Representative government corresponds to capital-rule. Both, however, are class-rule. But in a society where the distinction between capitalist and labourer has disappeared, there is no need of such a government; it would be an anachronism, a nuisance."[66] If Social-Democrats were to tell him they know this at least as well as he does, Kropotkine would reply that possibly they do, but that then they will not draw a logical conclusion from these premises. He, Kropotkine, is your real logician. Since the political constitution ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff

... but of regulation. It is here that we join issue not only with doctrinaire liberals, but with that large body of ordinary common-sense Englishmen who feel a general and instinctive distrust of all state interference. That distrust, I would point out, is really an anachronism. It dates from a time when the state was at once incompetent and unpopular, from the days of monarchic or aristocratic government carried on frankly in the interests of particular classes or persons. But the democratic ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson

... It was a curious anachronism that she should be the mistress of the situation with such a man as James. Yet so far she was mistress of the situation. The question was, how long would she remain so? It is possible that she had no understanding of this at first. It is possible that she would have resented such a question, ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum

... Clinch boldly. "They emigrated from Koln and Crefeld to Philadelphia, where there is a quarter named Crefeld." Mr. Clinch felt himself shaky as to his chronology, but wisely remembered that it was a chronology of the future to his hearers, and they could not detect an anachronism. With his eyes fixed upon those of the gentle Wilhelmina, Mr. Clinch now proceeded to describe his return to his fatherland, but his astonishment at finding the very face of the country changed, and a city standing on those fields he had played in as a boy; and ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... "Madama Butterfly" and Charpentier in "Louise." The Italian disciples of verismo are in full cry after nationalism and local color. A generation ago the scenes, the characters, and the subject of an opera were of no concern to the composer. His indifference to anachronism was like that of Shakespeare, whose stage-folk, whether supposed to be ancient Greeks, Romans, or Bretons, were all sixteenth-century Englishmen. When Verdi wrote his Egyptian opera he was content with a little splash of Orientalism which colors the chant ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... the year A.D. 403 "local recorders were appointed for the first time in the various provinces, who noted down statements and communicated the writings of the four quarters." An eminent critic—Mr. W. G. Aston—regards this as an anachronism, since the coming of the Korean scholar, Wani (vide sup.), did not take place until the year 405, which date probably preceded by many years the appointment of recorders. But it has been shown above that the innovation due to Wani was, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... he opposed the view, that every old belief, or institution, such as the throne or the Church, had served some need, and had a rational idea at the bottom of it, to which it might be again recalled, and made once more a benefit to society, instead of a curse and an anachronism. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... is, How to digest and assimilate the Newspaper? To complain of it, to desire its abolition, is an anachronism of the will: it is to complain that time proceeds, and that events follow each other in due sequence. It is hardly too bold to say that the newspaper is the modern world, as distinct from the antique and the mediaeval. It represents, by its advent, that epoch in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various

... describes external aggrandisement as the original thought and the ultimate aim of the earlier statesmen of the Revolution, is no better than ingenious nonsense. The whole performance rests on a gross and inexcusable anachronism. There is a contemptuous refusal to discriminate between groups of men who were as different from one another as Oliver Cromwell was different from James Nayler, and between periods which were as unlike in all their conditions ...
— Burke • John Morley

... for them. He had faith in the Divine ordering of the affairs of this world; but he forgot that the processes by which evils like that of slavery are done away are thousand-year-long,—that, to be effectual, they must be slow,—that wrong is no remedy for wrong. He was an anachronism, and met the fate of all anachronisms that strive to stem and divert the present current by modes which the world has outgrown. But now that he and those dearest to him have so bitterly expiated his faults, both charity and justice demand that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... the ancient trial by combat, the duel, was still blocking the way of English civilisation when Her Majesty assumed the sceptre. A palpable anachronism, it yet seemed impossible to make men act on their knowledge of its antiquated and barbarous character; legislation was fruitless of good against a practice consecrated by false sentiment and false ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling

... finished, it was the great centre of fashion, and the place of evening resort. At one corner of this Plaza is an insignificant chapel, built upon the spot where Columbus is said to have assisted at the first mass celebrated on the island; an anachronism easily exposed were it worth the while. The great discoverer never landed at Havana during his lifetime, though his body was brought hither for burial, centuries after his death. There is one fact relating to this site in the Plaza de Armas fully authenticated, ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou

... with justice complain that thereby all illusion was destroyed; and if Lord Burleigh in a moment of forgetfulness should don the hose of Henry the Fourth, then the War-Councilor Von Steinzopf's wife, nee Lilienthau, would not get the anachronism out of her head for the whole evening.... But little as this young man had comprehended the conditions of the Berlin drama, still less was he aware that the Spontini Janissary opera, with its kettledrums, elephants, trumpets, and gongs, is a heroic means of inspiring our enervated people ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... a Turkish title "Efendi" beingour esquire, and inferior to a Bey, is a rank anachronism, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton

... the civilians of the Bengal Presidency only. The Directors, when thus overruled chiefly by Pitt, created a similar college at Haileybury, which continued till the open competitive system of 1854 swept that also away; and the Company itself soon followed, as the march of events had made it an anachronism. ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith

... scarcely less gruesome than his shop. The furniture looked as if its manufacture had been coeval with the time of the Meynells, and the ghastly glare of the gas seemed a kind of anachronism. After a few preliminary observations, which were not encouraged by Mr. Grewter's manner, I inquired whether he had ever heard the name ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... is that the conclusions of the science of religions are as likely to be adverse as they are to be favorable to the claim that the essence of religion is true. There is a notion in the air about us that religion is probably only an anachronism, a case of "survival," an atavistic relapse into a mode of thought which humanity in its more enlightened examples has outgrown; and this notion our religious anthropologists at present do ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... the same the Philistine was an anachronism, a survival from an older world. The day of the Minoan, like that of his early friend the Egyptian, had passed away. The stars of new races were rising above the horizon, and new claimants were dividing the heritage of the ancient world. To the new Greek the realm of ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie

... it is common sense. The anarchy of individual production is already an anachronism. The control of the community over itself extends every day. We demand order, method, regularity, design; the accidents of sickness and misfortune, of old age and bereavement, must be prevented if possible, and if not, mitigated. Of this principle the public ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease

... celebrated writer flourished is A.D. 238 — that is, about 135 years before the birth of St. Patrick. To quote him as an authority on the subject of St. Patrick's Purgatory would therefore be a more absurd anachronism than any that has been pointed out in this curious list. This difficulty appeared to me so strong, that for a while I was led to believe that "Solino" was but a corrupted Spanish form of "Joceline," or "Joscelino," as it is sometimes given, ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca

... had. But I have sufficiently proved, in the Course of my Notes, that such Anachronisms were the Effect of poetic Licence, rather than of Ignorance in our Poet. And if I may be permitted to ask a modest Question by the way, *Why may not I restore an Anachronism really made by our Author, as well as Mr. Pope take the Privilege to fix others upon him, which he never had it in his Head to make; as I may venture to affirm He had not, in the Instance of Sir Francis Drake, to which I have spoke in the ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald

... his translation of the 'AEneid' to Lord Normanby, near the middle; when speaking of the anachronism that made ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... and of certain territories in Portuguese Africa, North Borneo is the sole remaining region in the world which is owned and administered by that political anachronism, a chartered company. It was in the age of Elizabeth that the chartered company, in the modern sense of the term, had its rise. The discovery of the New World and the opening out of fresh trading routes to the Indies gave a tremendous impetus to shipping, ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell

... Queen's memorable visit. The Irish experiences are probably the fruit of several expeditions, and Penelope has chosen to include this vivid impression of Her Majesty's welcome to Ireland, even though it might convict her of an anachronism. Perhaps as this is not an historical novel, but a 'chronicle of small beer,' the trifling inaccuracy ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... Our railways carry us safely into a mountain-world hitherto tremblingly scaled on foot. Events occurring in countries undiscovered when Europe confined the Jews in Ghettos are known to us in the course of an hour. Hence the misery of the Jews is an anachronism—not because there was a period of enlightenment one hundred years ago, for that enlightenment reached in reality only the ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl

... authentic *Barvs heavy baritone, barites *Biblos book Bible, bibliomania *Bios life biology, autobiography, amphibious *Cheir hand chiropody, chirurgical, surgeon *Chilioi a thousand kilogram, kilowatt *Chroma color chromo, achromatic Chronos time chronic, anachronism *Cosmos world, order cosmopolitan, microcosm *Crypto hide cryptogam, cryptology *Cyclos wheel, circle encyclopedia, cyclone *Deca ten decasyllable, decalogue *Demos people democracy, epidemic *Derma skin epidermis, taxidermist *Dis, di twice, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... that time,' I would say, 'you'll probably be married, and your wife mightn't quite—', whereat he would hotly repeat what he had said many times: that he would never marry. Marriage was an anti-social anachronism. I think its survival wasin some part due to the machinations of Capital. Anyway, it was doomed. Temporary civil contracts between men and women would be the rule 'ten, twelve years hence'; pending which time the lot of any man who had civic sense must ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm

... fear this is a sad geological anachronism; however, I cannot but hope that the Irish wolf-dog will yet be found in some cavern, associated with the prototypes of Ireland's earliest heroes who peopled the land soon after it ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse

... her Pontiffs, driven by his jealous patriotism. We seem to be transported back into the times of a Sixtus IV. or an Alexander VI. And in truth, Paul's reversion to the antiquated Guelf policy of his predecessors was an anachronism. That policy ceased to be efficient when Francis I. signed the Treaty of Cambray; the Church, too, had gradually assumed such a position that armed interference in the affairs of secular sovereigns was suicidal. This became so manifest that Paul's futile attack on Philip in 1556 may ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... as that indestructible entity, the spirit of race—as that impalpable strain which had existed in every Culpeper, and in all the Culpepers together, from the beginning. It was not, she realized plainly, such an anachronism as a survival of the aristocratic tradition. Deeper than this, it had its roots not in belief but in instinct—in the bone and fibre of Stephen's character. It was a part of that motive power which impelled him in the direction of the beaten road, of the established custom, of things as they ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow

... Though an anachronism as regards this stage of my career, I cannot resist a little episode which pleasantly illustrates moral courage, or chivalry at least, combined with ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... recognize is that this is a phenomenon in every way evil. There must be something wrong with any institution which does not appeal to many members of the highest types of womanhood. Perhaps in certain of its details this institution must be an anachronism, a survival from times to which it may have been well suited when the development of womanhood was habitually stunted, but inadequate to satisfy the demands of fully developed womanhood in our own days. Now from the eugenic point of view it is of course the ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... strike the novice as an anachronism to place vessels on the Ontario in the middle of the eighteenth century; but in this particular facts will fully bear out all the license of the fiction. Although the precise vessels mentioned in these pages may never have existed on that water or anywhere else, others so nearly resembling ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper

... account of Patrick Hamilton, with a reference to Francis Lambert's work on the Apocalypse. But it is to Foxe's great English work, in 1564, that Knox refers, and as the First Book of his History was not written until 1566, no anachronism can be discovered in such a reference. The succession of Queen Elizabeth to the English Throne, evidently suggested the propriety of putting upon record a detailed history of the fearful sufferings and persecutions which had been ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox

... given her life for him. And he also loved her; she was the first woman who had ever touched his heart. He had evidently felt himself isolated, with his old chivalrous ideas, in a world devoted to the worship of low things, tangible successes, and profitable realities. He was, so to speak, a living anachronism in the midst of a society which had faith in nothing except victorious brutalities, and which marched on, crushing, beneath its iron-shod heels, the hopes and visions of the enthusiastic. He recalled those evenings after a battle when, in ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... to the "Bull" in the High Street is a transition which seems almost an anachronism. It is but to follow in the traces of the Pickwick Club. The covered gateway, the staircase almost wide enough for a coach and four, the ballroom on the first floor landing, with card-room adjoining, and the bedroom which Mr. Winkle ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin

... goes on, that after a little laughter at the anachronism, Her Majesty took some trouble to explain to the malcontent that he was wrong, she did not kill Queen Mary, she had been very sorry for her fate. So far from killing her, she, Queen Victoria, was one of Queen Mary's descendants, ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler

... it was concluded and consecrated in the early part of the reign of Nectan. The church was dedicated to St. Brigid; and the Chronicon Pictorum (Innes' Inquiry, p. 778), in ascribing its foundation to Nectan I. (about A.D. 455) instead of Nectan II., commits a palpable anachronism, and very evident error, as St. Brigid did not die till a quarter of the next century had elapsed. (Annals of the Four Masters under the year 525; Colgan's Trias Thaumaturga, p. 619.) Again, according to the more certain evidence of Bede, another Pictish king, still of the name ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... celebrity in protestant England, as Luther had taught and written there shortly before, and the very name must have immediately suggested the idea of freedom in thinking. I cannot oven consider it an anachronism that Richard the Third should speak of Macchiavel. The word is here used altogether proverbially: the contents, at least, of the book entitled Of the Prince (Del Principe,) have been in existence ever since the existence of tyrants; Macchiavel was merely ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... could hardly have come into use until some months later, but the convenience covers the sin of the slight anachronism), Honore Grandissime, free man of color, entered from the rear room so silently that Joseph was first made aware of his presence by feeling him at his elbow. He handed the apothecary—but a few words in time, lest ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable

... representing of St Catharine with leering eyes, as she is here painted by Titian; that it is meant for a portrait, I find no excuse; some character more suited to the expression should have been chosen; and if it were only the picture of a saint, that expression was strangely out of character. An anachronism may be found in the Tobit over the door too, by acute observers, who will deem it ill-managed to paint the cross in the clouds, where it is an old testament story, and that story apocryphal beside; might ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi

... all the instincts common to civilised folk. Until Germany, 'deep patient Germany,' suddenly hoisted her colours as a champion of murder and rapine and barbarism, she the mother of art and literature and science, there was nothing in Europe that could compare with the anachronism of Turkey being there at all. Then, in August 1914, there was hoisted the German flag, superimposed with skulls and cross-bones, and all the insignia of piracy and highway robbery on land and on sea, and Germany showed herself an ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson

... least raise his voice in protest against its disguising itself in 'scientific' plumes. I think that all who have had the patience to follow me thus far will agree that the spencerian 'philosophy' of social and intellectual progress is an obsolete anachronism, reverting to a pre-darwinian type of thought, just as the spencerian philosophy of 'Force,' effacing all the previous distinctions between actual and potential energy, momentum, work, force, mass, etc., ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... superstitions of a barbaric age. It was, in fact, a venerable institution which certain men wished to perpetuate not so much from self-interest as from a blind veneration for its age and traditions. To them even the interests of the people were of far less importance than the maintenance of this anachronism in its absoluteness. Where the German rulers had the intelligence to divert opposing forces and even to utilize them to their own benefit, the Russian autocrats fought them and ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various

... went by and we find still another picture of the Holy Family by this same artist, in which five children are shown, while back in the shadow is the artist himself, posed as Joseph. And with a beautiful contempt for anachronism, the elder children are called Isaiah, Ezekiel and Elijah. This fusing of work, love and religion gives us a glimpse into the only paradise mortals know. It is the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard

... actual texts[FN162]; and that all the tales, even those dealing with events localised in Persia, India, China and other infidel lands and dated from ante-islamitic ages mostly with the naivest anachronism, confine themselves to depicting the people, manners and customs of Baghdad and Mosul, Damascus and Cairo, during the Abbaside epoch, and he makes a point of the whole being impregnated with the strongest and most zealous spirit of Mohammedanism. He points out that the language is the popular or ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... twenty-seven lights in all, and they constitute the lower part of five windows, a doorway taking the space of three lights. The eighth contains a mitre and a crozier, an initial E and the date 1022. This window is an anachronism, as Edric was not a mitred abbot. Abbot Froucester was the first to wear ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse

... establishment decorated in imitation of a Louis XIII. hôtellerie. Oaken beams supported the low-studded ceilings: The plaster walls disappeared behind tapestries, armor, old faïence. Beer and other liquids were served in quaint porcelain or pewter mugs, and the waiters were dressed (merry anachronism) in the costume of members of the Institute (the Immortal Forty), who had so long led poetry in chains. The success of the “Black Cat” in her new quarters was immense, all Paris crowding through ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory

... personages. Mr. Fox Bourne's 'English Merchants' furnished the tradition respecting Whittington. I am afraid the knighthood was really conferred on Henry's first return to England, after the battle of Agincourt; but human—or at least story-telling—nature could not resist an anachronism of a few years for such a story. The only other wilful alteration of a matter of time is with regard to the Duke of Burgundy's interview with Henry. At the time of Henry's last stay at Paris the Duke was attending the death-bed of his wife, Michelle of France, but he had been several ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the Byzantine Greeks in warfare, first against the Saracens at the siege of Constantinople in 673 A. D. Therefore an anachronism in this poem. Liquid fire was, however, known to the ancients, as Assyrian bas-reliefs testify. Greek fire was made possibly of naphtha, saltpetre, and sulphur, and was thrown upon the enemy from copper tubes; or pledgets of tow were dipped in ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning

... brooches. How came the Greeks, in the time of Euripides, to know about Inverness capes and Highland brooches? She, Keturah Vanhansen, had been so startled by what she feared might be a frightful anachronism that all her false hair had fallen off, and she had been left like one of ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler

... of words to a heat as voluble as his own. Often as the two moved briskly about, preparing a meal together, they shouted out from the dining-room to the kitchen a discussion on some unintelligible topic such as the "anachronism of the competitive system," so loudly voiced and so energetically pursued that when they came to sit down to table, they would be quite red-cheeked and stirred-up, and ate their dinners with as vigorous an appetite ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... middle age—that pleasant woman, with her happy face and softened manner, who unites the charms of both epochs, retaining the ready responsiveness of youth while adding the wider sympathies of experience—with her there has never been any such struggle to make herself an anachronism. Consequently she remains beautiful to the last, far more beautiful than all the paste and washes in Madame Rachel's shop could make her. Sometimes, if rarely in these latter days, we meet her in society, where she carries with her an atmosphere of her own—an atmosphere of ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous

... of knowing much of M. Cousin's works. I never came across them but on one small matter of fact, and on that I found him copying at second hand an anachronism which one would have conceived palpable to any reader of the original authorities. This is all I know of him, saving these his raptures over Proclus, of which I have quoted only a small portion, and of which ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley

... contemporary with him, if words are used that only became current at a later date, or are used in a sense that they only later acquired, or if later writers are imitated, or if events are mentioned that happened later ('anachronism'). Books are sometimes forged outright, that is, are written by one man and deliberately fathered upon another; but sometimes books come to be ascribed to a well-known name, which were written by some one else without fraudulent ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read

... infant. He had dawdled among men centuries older than himself. His whole being was out of harmony with the universe. Fate had held his soul fast during those Dark Ages when he might have striven nobly, and now had cast it forth, an anachronism. It was a soul misplaced in eternity. The dire realization grew and grew, and with it the tragic agony, until with a sudden and the bitterest of cries he flung up his arms and fell heavily ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... owed inception to the man at the desk. No. Not much. The cheque-book and the decorator's artist must have been responsible. This grossly Teutonic creature with his cynical, commercial mind, was something of an anachronism, and could never have inspired the perfect harmony of the palatial offices of his Corporation. It was rather a pity. He had been exceedingly good to her. She would have liked to think that he was the genius of the whole structure of the Skandinavia, even to the decorations of the ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum

... you down! These people are primitive enough to use metallic power lines to carry electricity to their hamlets, an anachronism you forgot last night. You piloted the helihopper into one of those lines, and the crash put you out for the rest of the night and most of today. These Alphardians are friendly, so desperately happy to be found again that it's ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee

... would be most ungrateful. I only expected a more characteristic example of sea cookery. After what Mr. Vane told us, a lunch like the one you provided, with glass and silver, struck me as rather an anachronism." ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss

... as I can see, is the least intelligent of the criticisms on this score. Unless a man writes in the exotic style of Brahms, Wagner, Dvorak and I know not what other Slav, Czech, Teuton or Hebrew, the critics are sure to accuse him of being an anachronism. The only man in England who is permitted to write in a style which is in the main of home growth is the Irish Jew, Sir Arthur Sullivan. If we may go to a foreign style why may we not go to one of an earlier period? But surely ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... gouvernment de son eglise, premierement les pasteurs, puis les docteurs, apres les ancients, quatrement les diacres," which passed substantially into the Book of Common Order in 1556. This being the case, we are not guilty of any anachronism in attributing substantially presbyterian opinions to our reformer, even if we have to grant that the particular church court first known as the greater eldership or presbytery, and now exclusively enjoying the title of presbytery, ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell

... were a little out of order,' said Elizabeth; 'either she meant his grandson, or Sir Walter Scott made as great an anachronism as when he made that same Ulrica compare Rebecca's skin to paper. If she had said parchment, it would not have been such ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge

... borrowed, in this paragraph, from a period extending over almost the whole of Charles's life, instead of being confined entirely to his boyhood. As I do not believe there was any change, so I do not believe there is any anachronism involved. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... some buy their Bible not because it is the Bible but in order to feast the eye on the familiar characters of the home tongue. So would Robinson Crusoe have glutted his sight with a copy of the London Times, could the goat have committed the anachronism of digging one out from among the flotsam in ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... something of an anachronism, and had as lofty a disregard for convention as had the ladies thronging the Court of Merlin. Nor, it must be admitted, was she herself any pronounced stickler for exactitude. Thus, she lopped half a dozen years off her age, allotted ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... close proximity to railroad tracks, or upon the main thoroughfares of cities where stone or asphalt pavements resound to every hoof-fall, and where street cars go whirring and clanging by all night long, is something more than an anachronism; it is a fiendish ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... of Vico was now a hundred years old. I did not mention him in his chronological place, because he exercised no immediate influence on the world. His thought was an anachronism in the eighteenth century, it appealed to the nineteenth. He did not announce or conceive any theory of Progress, but his speculation, bewildering enough and confused in its exposition, contained principles which seemed predestined to form the basis of such a doctrine. His aim was ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... Prelates in the Church, whose admirable example is enough even to shame the Clergymen under them into a sense of their duty. It is to be wished that we had many more such as they, for they are wanted. The Irish Evangelical party are certainly very numerous, and they must pardon me a slight anachronism or two regarding them, concerning what has been termed the Modern Reformation in these volumes. Are those who compose this same party, by the way, acquainted with their own origin? If not, I will tell ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... A Midsummer-Night's Dream is more of a masque than a drama—an entertainment rather than a play. The characters are mostly puppets, and scarcely any except Bottom has the least psychological interest for the reader. Probability is thrown to the winds; anachronism is rampant; classical figures are mixed with fairies and sixteenth-century Warwickshire peasants. The main plot is sentimental, the secondary plot is sheer buffoonery; while the story; of Titania's jealousy and Oberon's method ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick

... and dilapidated parts of the structure, which presents throughout a very ancient aspect, parts of the roof having evidently been renewed, and the gables showing traces of recent repairs, while the rickety pillars seem to protest with groans against the architectural anachronism that has piled so many young heads upon their ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens

... of these with which he favours me is in connection with an anachronism in the epistle ascribed to Polycarp, Ignatius being spoken of in chapter thirteen as living, and information requested regarding him "and those who are with him;" whereas in an earlier passage he is represented as dead. Dr. ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels

... (Dine zu Coblenz) Goethe has commemorated it. He sat between Lavater and Basedow, and during the meal the former expounded the Revelation of St. John to a country pastor, and the latter exerted himself to prove to a stolid dancing-master that baptism was an anachronism. ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown

... King of Bohemia; who first introduced the custom into this kingdom: for, before, women of every rank rode as men do" (T. ROSSII, Hist. Re. Ang. p. 205). In his beautiful illustrative picture of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims, Stothard appears to have committed an anachronism, in placing the most conspicuous female character of his fine composition sideways on her steed. That the lady should have been depicted riding in the male fashion, might, it strikes us, have been inferred, without any historical research on the subject, from the poet's describing her ...
— The Young Lady's Equestrian Manual • Anonymous

... fecht!" he yelled; and, in spite of his being such an anachronism, there was something grand now in the wild old figure, as he stood there in full view, from crown to buckled shoon, claymore sheathed, the jewels in his dirk sparkling, and the sun flashing from his eyes as he yelled out, "Ta slogan of ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn

... not published till another year had elapsed, we cannot accept the explanation above offered to us of the causes which led the founder of the sub-class Archencephala to seek for new points of distinction between the human and simian brains; but the Dutch anatomists may have fallen into this anachronism by having just read, in the paper by Professor Owen in the "Annals," some prefatory allusions to "the Vestiges of Creation," "Natural Selection, and the question whether man be or be not ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell

... afterwards, so much had she been excited. "Manse and Cuddie forced me to laugh out aloud, which one seldom does when alone." Many of the Scotch words "were absolutely Hebrew" to her. She not unjustly objected to Claverhouse's use of the word "sentimental" as an anachronism. Sentiment, like nerves, had not been invented in ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... big, busy foyer Sophy Gold herself was the one person distinctly out of the picture. One did not know where to place her. To begin with, a woman as irrevocably, irredeemably ugly as Sophy was an anachronism in Paris. She belonged to the gargoyle period. You found yourself speculating on whether it was her mouth or her nose that made her so devastatingly plain, only to bring up at her eyes and find that they alone were enough to wreck any ambitions ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber

... "The Critic" is not very often played nowadays; but every occasion of its revival is disfigured by the freedoms and buffoonery of its representatives. Modern costume is usually worn by Mr. Puff and his friends; and the anachronism has its excuse, perhaps, in the fact that the satire of the dramatist is as sound and relevant now as it was in the last century. And some modification of the original text might be reasonably permitted. For instance, the reference by name to the long-since departed actors, King, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook

... had sunk a little in becoming the head of the Old Bourne Tap importers. But he was hard enough, tyrannical enough, and had nerve enough to keep Free-trading alive in our parts until long after it had become an anachronism. He ended his days on the gallows, of course, but that was ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... movement, rollicking, Harry Lorrequer-like spirits were demanded for the Cheapside; a graceful union of brilliancy and depth was required for the Charing Cross. And, O, be sure the critics lay in wait to catch the young scribbler tripping! An anachronism here, a secondhand idea there, and the West End Wasp shrieked its war-whoop in an occasional note; or the Minerva published a letter from a correspondent in the Scilly Islands, headed "Another Literary ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon

... great mistake when we realized that the ownership of the laborer did not tend to increase production. The world at large had learned this long since, but black slavery arose again in America as an inexplicable anachronism, a wilful crime. The freeing of the black slaves freed America. Today we are challenging another ownership,-the ownership of materials which go to make the goods we need. Private ownership of land, tools, ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois

... worked according to plan, and was bent on destroying whatever seemed to him absurd in the customs and institutions of the country. Practically everything seemed so to him: the anachronism of the Joyous Entry, the mediaevalism of the Grand Privilege of Mary of Burgundy, the regionalism of provincial States, the prestige of the Church, the pilgrimages, the intolerance, down to the ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts

... his opinion, increased by the promotion. He refused to accept it because "it was no addition to his dignity, as he was already Cardinal and Bishop of Arras," but in this statement he committed an important anachronism. He was not Cardinal when he refused the see of Mechlin; having received the red hat upon February 26, 1561, and having already accepted the archbishopric in May of the preceding year. He affirmed that "no man would more resolutely defend the liberty and privileges of the provinces ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... themselves constantly. But their contemporaries, the makers of late additions to the Odyssey, and the later mosaic worker who put it together, never betrayed themselves to anything like the fatal extent of anachronism exhibited by the Cyclic poets. How, if the true ancient tone, taste, manners, and religion were lost, as the Cyclic poets show that they were, did the contemporary Ionian poets or rhapsodists know and preserve ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... of chivalry sprang to life a logical production of the times. Their authors seized on the character of a king and a warrior—their highest conception of greatness, in the persons of Charlemagne and Arthur. Regardless of anachronism, they represented their heroes as the centre of a chivalric court, accoutred in the arms, and practising the customs of later centuries; they created in fact a new Arthur and a new Charlemagne, adapted to the new times. They brought to light the almost forgotten characters of antiquity. ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... more easily reconciled to some other faults which are rather due to expectations raised by his critics than to positive errors. No one, for example, would care to notice an anachronism, if Landor did not occasionally put in a claim for accuracy. I have no objection whatever to allow Hooker to console Bacon for his loss of the chancellorship, in calm disregard of the fact that Hooker died ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... prophetic, or whether it is the result of incompetence, or whether it is merely a smile gone wrong in the baking. It is amusing to find Marocco, who has not been strict about archaeological accuracy hitherto, complain here that there is an anachronism, inasmuch as some young ecclesiastics are dressed as they would be at present, and one of them actually carries a wax candle. This is not as it should be; in works like those at Oropa, where implicit reliance is justly placed ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler

... were idle most of the time, and lawyers lived from hand to mouth. The then state of local society was so rudimentary that it had not acquired the habit of appeal to the law for settlement of its differences. And while it may sound an anachronism, it is nevertheless the simple truth that while life was far less secure through that period, average personal honesty then ranked higher and depredations against property were fewer than at any ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson

... called a fair field.' Certainly it might; but by Englishmen of recent generations, and not by Danish immigrants of the ninth century. To balance the anomaly of what certainly wears a faint soupcon of anachronism—namely, the apparent anticipation of the modern Norse word field, Mr. Ferguson's conjecture would take a headlong plunge into good classical English. Now of this there is no other instance. Even the little swells of ground, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... together) was made during the former king's reign and was never used by Arthur at all. What are such crude exactitudes to us? As well object to the heavy plate-armour worn by the knights—everybody knows this to be an anachronism of nigh a thousand years. Romantic phantasy and scientific data are as far apart as the poles, and none but a fool would try to reconcile them. King Arthur feasted in the castle hall, says Malory, and so far as ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan

... development of the national department and the multiplication of its divisions have necessitated special modes of publication and rendered the annual report almost an anachronism so far as it pretends to be what it at one time was—a pretty complete report of the scientific and other work of the department. The attempts which I have made through the proper authorities to get ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various

... philosophical to decide of another age by the changes and the feelings through which our own has passed. There is a chronology of human opinions which, not observing, an indiscreet philosopher may commit an anachronism ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... observation that Braxfield's is an extreme case of eighteenth-century manners, as he himself was an eighteenth-century personage (he died in 1799, in his seventy-eighth year); and that for the date in which the story is cast (1814) such manners are somewhat of an anachronism. During the generation contemporary with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars—or, to put it another way, the generation that elapsed between the days when Scott roamed the country as a High School ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship. This Divine Being in some of his smaller and silkier incarnations takes, in the affection of Woman, the place to which there is no human male aspirant. The Dog is a survival—an anachronism. He toils not, neither does he spin, yet Solomon in all his glory never lay upon a door-mat all day long, sun-soaked and fly-fed and fat, while his master worked for the means wherewith to purchase the idle wag of the Solomonic tail, seasoned with ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... the naming of the villages of Jair, which we find in Deuteronomy iii. 14, is quite inconsistent with another account in Judges x. 3, 4. One of them must be erroneous, and it is probable that the passage in Deuteronomy is an anachronism. ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden

... with an oak-beamed ceiling, curving into a dome. The walls were hung with a wonderful tapestry of a soft, rich colour, and every piece of furniture in the room was of the Louis Quinze period. There was scarcely a single anachronism. The Martin de Vaux of forty years ago had been an artist, and a man of taste; and when he had brought home his bride, a duke's daughter, he had spent a small fortune on this apartment. Since then it had always been her favourite, and she ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... half after the marriage of Ethelberta and the evening adventures which followed it, a man young in years, though considerably older in mood and expression, walked up to the 'Red Lion' Inn at Anglebury. The anachronism sat not unbecomingly upon him, and the voice was precisely that of the Christopher Julian of heretofore. His way of entering the inn and calling for a conveyance was more off-hand than formerly; he was much less afraid of the sound of his own voice now than when he had gone through the same performance ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... is to make a clean sweep of everything," he said. "Money is an anachronism, and in a perfectly ordered State ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various



Words linked to "Anachronism" :   timekeeping, artefact, misdating, anachronistic, anachronous, unusual person, anachronic, artifact, anomaly



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