solecism

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“
You may see, it is true, an earth-worm in a robin's beak, and may hear a thrush breaking a snail's shell; but these little things are, as it were, passed by with a kind of twinkle for apology, as by a well-bred man who does openly some little solecism which is too slight for direct mention, and which a meaner man might hide or avoid.

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Definitions (10)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (3)

  1. noun A nonstandard usage or grammatical construction.
  2. noun A violation of etiquette.
  3. noun An impropriety, mistake, or incongruity.

Toggle Century definitions Century Dictionary (5)

Toggle GNU Webster definitions GNU Webster's 1913 (1)

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Examples (50)

  • The Jacobins are decidedly adverse to it; and it is a sort of revolutionary solecism, that those who boast of having been the original destroyers of despotism, are now the advocates of arbitrary imprisonment, and restraints on the freedom of the press. —  A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795
  • He shunned them as he did an English solecism, which he never committed, save as a decoy to draw the fire of the ever-watchful and hopeless grammatical purist CHAPTER XVI. —  Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions
  • "SAT" a kind of solecism, one of those repetitive redundancies that repeats itself -- bad form for a test measuring verbal ability.
  • One does not certainly see why such a scientific solecism should be more defensible in jurisprudence than in any other region of thought. —  Ancient Law Its Connection to the History of Early Society
  • For a divided royalty is a solecism--an absurdity in politics. —  Dialogues of the Dead
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Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (2)

Toggle American Heritage etymologies American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. Latin soloecismus, from Greek soloikismos, from soloikizein, to speak incorrectly, from soloikos, speaking incorrectly, after Soloi (Soli), an Athenian colony in Cilicia where a dialect regarded as substandard was spoken.

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (1)

  1. from Old French solecisme, French solécisme = Spanish Portuguese Italian solecismo = German solöcismus, from Latin solœcismus, from Greek σολοικισ, σ1μός, from σολοικίζειν, speak or write incorrectly, be rude or awkward in manner, from σόλοικος, speaking incorrectly, using provincialisms (οἱ σολοικοί, foreigners), also awkward or rude in manners: said to have meant orig. ‘speaking or acting like an inhabitant of Soli,’ from Σόλοι, L, Soli, Soloe, a town in Cilicia, a place said to have been colonized by Athenian emigrants (afterward called Pompeiopolis, now Mezetli), or, according to another account, by Argives and Lydians from Rhodes. Others refer the word to another town. Soli. Σόλοι, in Cyprus.
 

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/ˈsɑləsɪzm/
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