vulgarise

• “But I can say very truthfully that no slight whatever was intended, in regard to a scholar who did more than almost any other single man to "vulgarise" (in the wholly laudable sense of that too often degraded word) the body of English literature.”

  A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 To the Close of the 19th Century

• “vulgarise" Switzerland; but as far as I am concerned I freely give it up to them and offer them a personal welcome and take a peculiar satisfaction in seeing them here.”

  Italian Hours

• “Jack Nicholson could vulgarise Jim Broadbent's finely modulated performance as a dad with Alzheimer's.”

  The Guardian: TV review: Exile and The Secret Millionaire

• “And basing on this premise, later exponents of Marxism dare to vulgarise the concepts of communism to such an extent that capitalism with all its malevolent designs get the chance to settle the scores with human cries and whispers.”

  Problems of Communism

• “In this situation it becomes relatively easy to debase and vulgarise the noble effort to create a new South Africa that belongs to all who live in it, black and white.”

  ANC Today

• “Buddhist bishop and priests entertained us in one of the guest-rooms, and to Enoshima and Kamakura, “vulgar” resorts which nothing can vulgarise so long as Fujisan towers above them.”

  Unbeaten Tracks in Japan

• “Life had been against him; when, the resolve was strongest, poverty and ill-heath kept him down, and since then, with the years that passed, he had come to see that his place would only have been among the multitude of little talents, whose destiny it is to imitate and vulgarise the strivings of genius, to swell the over-huge mass of mediocrity.”

  Maurice Guest

• “He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animate abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarise it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.”

  Crime and Punishment

• “As for Mr Keats '"Endymion," it has just as much to do with Greece as it has with "old Tartary the fierce;" no man, whose mind has ever been imbued with the smallest knowledge or feeling of classical poetry or classical history, could have stooped to profane and vulgarise every association in the manner which has been adopted by this "son of promise.”

  Early Reviews of English Poets

• “To catalogue the present features of Battle Abbey is to vulgarise it.”

  Highways & Byways in Sussex

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