noun
definition
(classicism) A common, ordinary person.
definition
(collective) The common people.
definition
The vernacular tongue or common language of a country.
adjective
definition
Debased, uncouth, distasteful, obscene.
example
The construction worker made a vulgar suggestion to the girls walking down the street.
definition
(classical sense) Having to do with ordinary, common people.
definition
Common, usual; of the typical kind.
Examples of vulgar in a Sentence
Avoid vulgar errors; cherish universal sympathy.
I must confess to a weakness for a well turned heel - nothing too high or too vulgar.
But this seems an unwarrantable concession to the vulgar opinion that two bodies cannot co-exist in the same place.
For the great mass of the people Zoroaster's doctrine was too abstract and spiritualistic. The vulgar fancy requires sensuous, plastic deities, which admit of visible representation; and so the old gods received honour again and new gods won acceptance.
In the same spirit he investigated the generation of eels, which were at that time supposed, not only by the ignorant vulgar, but by "respectable and learned men," to be produced from dew without the ordinary process of generation.
Women should always assert themselves when possible and seek help if their tattoo (or any other physical feature) begins to warrant threats, slurs, or other forms of vulgar behavior.
His ambition had nothing in common with the vulgar eagerness for place and pay and social standing.
But these men were accounted magicians by the vulgar; and, while the one eventually assumed the tiara, the other was incarcerated in a dungeon.
Still more 1 It is highly characteristic of Platonism that the issue in this dialogue, as originally stated, is between virtue and vice, whereas, without any avowed change of ground, the issue ultimately discussed is between the philosophic life and the life of vulgar ambition or sensual enjoyment.
Avoid flooding the room with silly, vulgar, or commercial comments.
It is a mistake to regard the Latin of Plautus as "vulgar" Latin.
The word "herd" is also applied in a disparaging sense to a company of people, a mob or rabble, as "the vulgar herd."
Middle and Late Egyptian.These represent the vulgar speech of the Middle and New Kingdoms respectively.
The popular Lucidarius also appeared in the vulgar tongue.
Thus the name which once denoted the good genius who bestowed the precious gift of water upon man was adopted to this use in vulgar Latin under the form Catamitus.
Except perhaps the silversmiths, no one was conscious of being engaged in "art metal-working," yet the average is neither vulgar nor in bad taste, and the larger works are both dignified and suited to their architectural surroundings.
In the vulgar dialect already mentioned, the sound begins as a more open sound than in the cultivated pronunciation, so that no is really pronounced as naou.
We do not need to be reminded that Beatrice's adorer had a wife and children, or that Laura's poet owned a son and daughter by a concubine, in order to perceive that the mystic passion of chivalry was compatible in the middle ages with commonplace matrimony or vulgar illegitimate connexions.
It is, however, important as the first specimen of a chronicle written not for the learned but for the instruction of the monks and the common people, in the language of the vulgar, with an admixture of Latin and Oriental words.
But it would be difficult to mention the name of any European king whose private life shows such a record of vulgar vice unredeemed by higher aims of any kind.
From this it will be manifest that the figures of Zoroasters religion are purely abstracrions; the concrete gods of vulgar belief being set aside.
It is a piece of vigorous invective, displaying, like all his subsequent writings, an astonishing command of Latin, and much brilliant rhetoric, but full of vulgar abuse, and completely missing the point of the Ciceronianus of Erasmus.
On the 6th of October 1382 the crown licence in mortmain was issued, on the loth-13th of October the site was conveyed, and on the 20th of October 1382 "Sancte Marie collegium" or in vulgar tongue "Seinte Marie College of Wynchestre by Wynchestre" was founded for a warden and "70 pore and needy scholars studying and becoming proficient in grammaticals or the art and science of grammar."
Fleury, Rabelais is a sober reformer, an apostle of earnest work, of sound education, of rational if not dogmatic religion, who wraps up his morals in a farcical envelope partly to make them go down with the vulgar and partly to shield himself from the consequences of his reforming zeal.
He withdrew from vulgar applause, conscious that his narrative would be considered "disappointing to the ear," yet he recast the materials out of which he constructed it in order to lift that narrative into the realm of pure literature.
His insatiable researches into natural fact brought upon him among the vulgar some suspicion of practising those magic arts which of all things he scouted and despised.
This notice attracted Swift's attention, and in January 1708 he issued predictions for the ensuing year by Isaac Bickerstaff, written to prevent the people of England being imposed upon by vulgar almanac makers.
The severe training through which he had passed had given him such an experimental knowledge of all the modes of religious melancholy as he could never have gathered from books; and his vigorous genius, animated by a fervent spirit of devotion, enabled him not only to exercise a great influence over the vulgar, but even to extort the half-contemptuous admiration of scholars.
Fractions other than decimal fractions are usually called vulgar fractions.
Apart from this extravagant eulogy, it is absurd to regard Apollonius merely as a vulgar charlatan and miracle-monger.
But he had that quality which Aristotle places high among the virtues - the noble mean of Magnificence, standing midway between the two extremes of vulgar ostentation and narrow pettiness.
The Muses carried off the second prize in 405, Aristophanes being first with the Frogs, in which he accuses Phrynichus of employing vulgar tricks to raise a laugh, of plagiarism and bad versification.
It is a more obvious, if perhaps a more vulgar, criticism of the great development to say that it was too simply intellectual - seeking clear-cut definitions and dogmas without measuring the resources at the command of Christians or the urgency of their need for such things.
That pleasure is not the real absolute good, was no ground for not including it in the good of concrete human life; and after all only coarse and vulgar pleasures were indissolubly linked to the pains of want.
But though Plato holds this inseparable connexion of best and pleasantest to be true and important, it is only for the sake of the vulgar that he lays this stress on pleasure.
Shaftesbury had conclusively shown that these were not in the vulgar sense selfish; but the very stress which he lays on the pleasure inseparable from their exercise suggests a subtle egoistic theory which he does not expressly exclude, since it may be said that this " intrinsic reward " constitutes the real motive of the benevolent man.
His erudition was large but ill-digested; his knowledge of the ancient authors, if extensive, was superficial; his style was vulgar; he had no brilliancy of imagination, no pungency of epigram, no grandeur of rhetoric. Therefore he has left nothing to posterity which the world would not very willingly let die.
He was not indeed aware how deeply he had committed himself; otherwise he would have observed that his argument, if valid against the Many of the vulgar, was valid also against the One of Parmenides, with its plurality of attributes, as well as that, in the absence of a theory of predication, it was useless to speculate about knowledge and being.
Married to a woman of loose morals, and afterwards to a devout Italian, he was gross and vulgar in his appetites and pleasures.
In this way, by a theory which, according to Averroes, involves the negation of science, the Moslem theologians believed that they had exalted God beyond the limits of the metaphysical and scientific conceptions of law, form and matter; whilst they at the same time stood aloof from the vulgar doctrines, attributing a causality to things.
The very various periods named make it probable that the periodical return of the phoenix belongs only to vulgar legend, materializing what the priests knew to be symbolic. Of the birds of the heron family the gorgeous colours and plumed head spoken of by Pliny and others would be least inappropriate to the purple heron (Ardea purpurea), with which, or with the allied Ardea cinerea, it has been identified by Lepsius and Peters (Alteste Texte des Todtenbuchs, 1867, p. 51).
The applause of the vulgar was mingled with the derision of the court party.
The special development of the vulgar Latin tongue in Spain, and the formation of the three linguistic types just enumerated, were promoted by political circumstances.
It is agreed on all hands that Castilian is one of the two branches of the vulgar Latin.
One and the same vulgar tongue, diversely modified in the lapse of time, has produced Castilian and Portuguese as two varieties, while Catalan, the third language of the Peninsula, connects itself, as has already been pointed out, with the Gallo-Roman.
Some nominative formsDis (anciently Dios, and in the Castilian of the Jews Dlo), Cdrias, Mdrcos, sastre (s a r t 0 r) have been adopted instead of forms derived from the accusative, but the vulgar Latin of the Peninsula in no instance presents two forms (subjective and objective case) of the same substantIve.
The vulgar Latin of Spain has kept the pluperfect indicative, still in current use vs a secondary form of the conditional (cantdra, yendira, pariiira), and, what is more remarkable still, as not occurring anywhere elle, the future perfect (canidre, vendiire, pcriiire, formerly canliro, vendilro, partiro).
The vulgar Latin of the Peninsula, moreover, has preserved the 2nd pars.
Many peculiarities isf pronunciation, however, are commonly called Andalusian which are far from being confined to Andalusia proper, but are met with in the vulgar speech of many parts of the Castilian domain, both in Europe and in America.
Though short o changed in the Latin of the last age of the Roman republic to u in unaccented syllables always (except after u whether vowel or consonant), and sometimes also in accented syllables, this was not equally true of vulgar Latin, as is shown by the Romance languages.