Word: better
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Dates: during 1873-1873
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Whatever my profession in life, the individuals who shall be my patrons, the facts with which I shall deal, will be the people and facts of the present age. What preparation will better fit me to meet the practical demands of to-day than a seven years' study of the politics, literature, and society of ancient foreign and half-civilized nations...
...would be a physician. Then let me devote the best years of my life to the Classics. It is far more important that I should know the derivation of the names of my medicines than their chemical composition; the terms of anatomy than the science itself. It is better to know that AEsculapius raised the dead, than to understand the art of keeping men alive...
...ministry may have charms for me. In either case, dead Latin and Greek are better than living English, German, and French to inspire me for future work...
NOTHING astonishes a German or a Frenchman, when beginning the study of English, more than our vowel-sounds, unless perhaps our consonant-sounds. The English language abounds in vowels which are little better than grunts. We have hosts of curt little vowels that seem to be the remnants of some full sounds which a continual press of business prevents us from ever completing. One of the most hybrid and unsatisfactory of these - to take an instance - is our short o, as in hot. It is quite interesting to speculate as to what the full sound can be which is swallowed...
...writings of French authors. M. Taine claims to appreciate our language and literature at least as fully as any of his countrymen; but in his remarks on Shakespeare you can see, if you examine at all closely, a lurking pity for the poor islanders who have found nothing better than an extremely improbable and barbarous language to express their ideas...