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Great Expectations vocabulary
361 vocabulary words, including people, places, music, artists, etc.
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parenthesis
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► definition
Definition:a fork in spoken or written thought; a digression from the main subject or point; an aside
► uses
Uses:
("You listen to this," said my sister to me, in a severe parenthesis.)
Charles Dickens. Great Expectations (1861)
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he thought, were likely to be soothed by a bland parenthesis here and there—coming from a man of property, who might have been as impious as others.
George Eliot. Middlemarch
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And she began telling him everything, hurriedly, disjointedly, exaggerating the facts, inventing many, and so prodigal of parentheses that he understood nothing of it.
Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary.
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"I black my boots," pursued he savagely. "I brush my paletôt."
"No, Monsieur, it is too plain; you never do that," was my parenthesis.
Charlotte Brontë. Villette
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it is only with difficulty that he restrains himself from giving it flow; he dreads and deprecates the anger of him whom he addresses; yet, the thought strikes him, that by certain involutions and parentheses this anger may be engendered.
Edgar Allan Poe. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 2: The Imp of the Perverse 1845)
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Added to which of course would be the pecuniary emolument by no means to be sneezed at, going hand in hand with his tuition fees. Not, he parenthesised, that for the sake of filthy lucre he need necessarily embrace the lyric platform as a walk in life for any lengthy space of time.
James Joyce. Ulysses
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Fastidious Brisk: [takes a puff of tobacco between breaks while talking] Troth, sweet lady, I shall [PUFFS] — be prepared to give you thanks for those thanks, and — study more officious, and obsequious regards — to your fair beauties. — Mend the pipe, boy.
Macilente: I never knew tobacco taken as a parenthesis before.
Ben Jonson. Every Man out of His Humour (1600)
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