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Use gist in a sentence

Definition of gist:

  • (noun) the central meaning or theme of a speech or literary work
  • (noun) the choicest or most essential or most vital part of some idea or experience

Sentence Examples:

Being the expurgated gist of his luridly profane protests.

The italicized words contain the gist of the whole matter.

The gist of the whole matter reduces to a simple syllogism.

Well, what the hell is the gist of all this palaver?

The gist of his advocacy of Greek is contained in the following allegations.

In this lies the gist of the moralist's arguments in favor of a partial female emancipation.

The gist of his mental maundering was a childlike desire to have everything sewed up tight.

The gist of the Japanese creed, as based on their ancient annals, may be briefly summarized.

She ignored the gist of this remark, and began to unhook the collar of her jacket.

Then she added, half to herself and rather irrelevantly too, considering the gist of the foregoing conversation.

The gist of the matter is that Brahms was a Teuton and wrote with characteristic Teutonic reserve and dignity.

That has been the gist of the parables which I have tried to adapt to the comprehension of my parishioners.

"Possibly I misconstrue your meaning," he said, with some bluntness, determined to reach the gist of the matter at once.

This was the gist of the letter; but I can convey no notion of its mixture of love and sauciness.

The gist of the whole matter is here; and how much weariness and dullness and plodding is left out!

The gist of it was the reduction of the surplus by increasing the duties; that is, making them prohibitory.

The whole gist of the matter lay in the fact that his aunt had so cavalierly ordered him to do it.

I think the entire crowd had grasped the gist of it inside of four minutes; and their exclamatory comments were extraordinary, grotesque.

Gist, the brave and intrepid commander of the Fifteenth, was killed by a Federal sharpshooter, the command devolving on Capt.

This, briefly, was the gist of the matter which Robertson related to the inspector with many repetitions and persistent volubility.

He made Abraham translate that into Turkish, lest the full gist of it be lost, and I sat comparing the two men.

It has been rather a long story to tell, and full of platitudes, but the gist of it is by this time clear.

To the first shout of rage now succeeded a deafening yell of exasperation as the people caught the gist of these proud words.

Gist, an experienced frontiersman, who knew well the ways of the wilderness, and by four other persons, two of them Indian traders.

She paused as if she felt it indecorous to speak of her pregnancy before Pierre, though the gist of the matter lay in that.

The charm of the Russian words, the fascination of grasping the gist of the theme broke in vain against the prevailing chill.

Still there can be no doubt that the elimination of the middle term is the very gist of syllogistic reasoning as ordinarily understood.

Cannot I contrive to embrace the gist of the Spanish subject without involving myself in the unwieldy barbarous records of a thousand years?

Undoubtedly there were several Germans on board the submarine who understood English well enough to gather the gist of the irate stoker's remarks.

That is the gist of the Socialist attitude towards marriage; the repudiation of private ownership of women and children, and the payment of mothers.

It was a long and wordy screed, couched in the quaint and flowery language of the Moors, but the above was the gist of it.

To make himself absolutely understood he repeated the gist of his remarks in Spanish before he turned his back on them to finish his interrupted scene.

We can only refer inquirers to the original evidence (some of which is most conflicting) and give the gist of what seems to be indubitable fact.

The gist of it went through the mass of maddened beings, only to be so soon impugned by the man who had started it from Beth.

Its gist was that he might be going to re-encounter the Well-Beloved that night: after her recent long hiding she meant to reappear and intoxicate him.

Loneliness assailed her rather bleakly as she stood with a smiling mouth, gazing from one to the other and trying to gather the gist of their news.

Though his elocution may have been of a style peculiar to beginners and his pronunciation occasionally startling in its originality, still Sammy gathered the gist of the story.

Unknown to Joe, I had taken shorthand notes of the gist of his information, and when he was again busy with his emery I went over them carefully.

It seems likely that the gist of the Mayan inscriptions which deal with history will be solved in somewhat the same fashion as those that deal with astronomy.

This sentence was the gist of the letter, the stiff unmeaning letter, which was as dull and labored as a schoolboy's holiday missive to his honored parents.

Kenneth's French was not so good as his German, but he managed, even though haltingly, to convey to his interested auditors the gist of the scheme he had overheard.

Betty flushed, cast an agonized thought back through the years, to try to remember the gist of those three missives, failed completely, and nervously twisted her fingers together.

She had been on the outskirts of the crowd and, having got the gist of the matter, retired to her hut, waiting for the call she knew would come.

He then enters upon a long rigmarole, the gist of which is how necessary it is for a man to do his duty; with which novel sentiment I express my entire agreement.

We must not expect to find the gist of Aristophanes in vivid portraits of character, in situations borrowed from every-day life, in witty dialogues, in carefully constructed plots arriving at felicitous conclusions.

The gist of an oath is, and always has been, that the swearer calls upon the Almighty to inflict punishment upon him here or hereafter if he is false to his oath.

Even the teachers rattled off their questions with an atrocious, half-enunciated pronunciation, and he must have been a Spanish scholar indeed who could have caught more than the gist of the recited answers.

Not a word does she utter, not a word does she hear; engrossed in this, the first love of her life, the play itself goes on without her taking in the gist of it.

And our oppressive difficulty is bound up with this problem, and can be dispelled only by its solution, for the gist of the difficulty is nothing else than the gradualness of human becoming.

What is required is that he shall say what he elects to say discreetly; that he shall be quick to see the gist of a matter, and give it pithily without either prolixity or stint of words.

The gist of his argument was, that the saints knew for themselves, in their own hearts, that Mormonism was true, and, therefore, that no Gentile (or outside unbeliever) could possibly disprove it.

The charge in its utter, its laughable irrelevancy, was, he thought, a little hard on the saint, seeing how the gist of the new creed lay all in a natural enjoyment of life's bounties.

The Kimberley correspondence is of a chatty description, refers to the weather and papers (which have not arrived), but the gist of the whole is cheerful and consequently welcome, though we should prefer news.

He appeared to know enough English to get the gist of my passport, but handed it back with the information that I should have official Guatemalan permission to exist within the confines of his eighteen-for-a-dollar country.

The gist of this definition of matter was to clear the decks for scientific calculation, by removing from nature the moral density and moral magic with which the Socratic philosophy had encumbered it.

There is no inconsistency between the portions ascribed to the one narrative and those referred to the other; and the account, as we have it, may give what was the gist of several co-ordinate documents.

Aristotle's objection ignored the gist of Plato's teaching to the effect that man could not attain a theoretical insight into the good except as he had passed through years of practical habituation and strenuous discipline.

The infinite insignificance of the comfort on horseback of one spare driver had not yet dawned upon me; later on, I learned that indispensable philosophy whose gist is, "Take what comes, and don't worry."

At that time she could give many data about her family correctly, but was slow, even if correct, in calculation, and, though she got the gist of a test story, she left out some important details.

It is to some extent subtilized by the circumstance that the facts are not facts, and that the gist of the drama is to lie in the gradual triumph of the truth over this tissue of falsehoods.

The gist of most of the speeches which I heard, or heard of, was, advising to hope, to firmness, to stand shoulder to shoulder, and a counsel to be law-abiding, wrapped up in a little discreet blarney.

One, I remember, but it was so interlarded with technical terms, which he explained at the time, that I fear it will lose half its gist by their omission, and the substitution of my shore-going phraseology.

To give the gist of it in a few words is next to impossible, because it is so largely taken up with superfine distinctions in the meaning of words for which our language has at best but rough equivalents.

The gist of the phenomenon is that in certain hypnotic states the skin of the subject becomes insensitive to pain but the "sensibility" is transferred to a sensitive layer a few centimeters distant from the skin.

Then one is taken through vast barracks littered with people of every European race, every type of low-class European costume, and every degree of dirtiness, to a central hall in which the gist of the examining goes on.

This done, you overwhelm them with this sage and logical conclusion: "The gist of the offense of conspiracy consists in a confederacy to do an unlawful act, and the offense is complete when the confederacy is made."

As a matter of course, the information had been greatly embellished in having passed through so many channels, nor was it of so definite a character as I have noted it down, but that was the gist of it.

It proves, in short, that to pass through this finite space requires a time which is infinitely divisible, but not an infinite time: the confounding of which distinction Hobbes had already seen to be the gist of the fallacy.

And exactly as an intelligent reader, in a first perusal of a new subject, snatches the heart out of paragraph after paragraph, ignoring the details until later, she took to herself only the gist of her host's recital.

Frank rapidly detailed to Billy the gist of their conversation with the Secretary of the Navy, having first called up that official on the telephone and secured his permission to enlist Billy as a member of the expedition.

While the learned man and the fool are disputing in the palace before the king upon his throne, the former says: "The gist of my argument is, that the new play Puss in Boots is a good play."

Penelope stood two or three steps higher, and though the younger woman in time forgot the actual words, she always remembered their gist, and the rapt, glowing look, the deliberation, with which they had been uttered.

At these words a kick from behind apprised the loyal champion that a very ragged auditory, who for some time past had not well understood the gist of his eloquence, had at length comprehended enough to be angry.

The gist of the charge was that they were foreigners meddling with the affairs of Venice; they confessed all the noble ladies of Venice, called on them in their homes, and through them learned the official secrets.

The gist of the contention lies in the fact that the Democracy seek to arrest a robbery that has already made their opponents rich, and the swag thus obtained affords the means through which it may be held.

In fact, the gist of the long and difficult grilling was an apparent determination on the part of each one of the two factions to accuse the other, and a most plausible and complacent assumption of innocence by both.

Slowly, falteringly, she went on, sometimes reciting a whole sentence in the very words of the letter, sometimes only giving the gist; but always in the same low, monotonous voice, like the utterance of one who speaks in sleep.

Though demurring somewhat at the necessity of translating at all what the old man said, the author feels compelled to give the gist of the charge he gave the hunters concerning their conduct when they should meet an elephant.

For the gist of the German fighting, however confused, barbarous, and devastating, was to be found in the determination of men to resist authority and oppression, to have souls of their own, and to say they were their own.

I have composed this particular series of harangues in metrical shape, because the gist of the same thoughts is found arranged in a short form in a certain ancient Danish song, which is repeated by heart by many conversant with antiquity.

"Obey the Emperor and follow your own instincts," is the gist of the Shinto religion, in so far as it may be called a religion at all: the tendency is to consider it only a form of patriotism and not a religion.

The question of the division of power between these two potentates, though not yet understood by the public, does not seem to be more complicated than that analogous one just alluded to, and of which they evidently understand the gist.

Three girlish voices chimed an answer of which he extracted the gist at his leisure; managing to arrive at the important item, that Miles was setting himself above all innocent amusements, and declined to accompany his sisters to the tournament.

It was observed that often an interpreter, anxious only to state the gist of the matter in hand, would render in a single English sentence an elaborately ornate speech of an orator that had extended through many minutes in its utterance.

It is strong, genuine argument about difficult matters, fairly tracing what is difficult, fairly trying to grapple, not with what appears the gist and strong point of a question, but with what really at bottom is the knot of it.

In the latter case, positive, personal pain, was the gist of the matter: in the former, the heart might be pierced, and the mind be overwhelmed, without the necessity of any such incurable affliction as children's deaths amount to.

Maitland then proceeded to address the Court and to sum up his case, the gist of which I shall give you as nearly as possible in his own words, omitting only such portions as were purely formal, uninteresting, or unnecessarily verbose.

One may say that the adverse factors in his problem at this time were purely imaginary; that a little resolution and determined activity would have shaken off the incubus: but this is to lose sight of the gist of the matter.

The history of the impost is next very briefly dealt with, the gist of the information on the subject being that the tax had been levied from a period beyond the memory of the "oldest people" without quarrel or dispute.

There is no witness in the world more difficult to cope with than a shrewd old woman who apes stupidity, only to reiterate the gist of her testimony in such incisive fashion as to leave it indelibly imprinted on the minds of the jury.

Sitting thus together, her warm, lithe body close to his, he sensed unconsciously the pleasure of her presence, but his mind was intent on his work, confining in the laconic form of a cable message the gist of the event.

The speaker then went into a long dissertation on the primal sin; the gist of which was that though the woman had never been warned not to eat of the Forbidden Fruit, she had to bear the brunt of the punishment.

Evolution is an orderly unfolding from the single to the diversified, from the simple to the complex, in which process life evolves by passing from lower to higher forms and storing within itself the gist of the experiences gained in each.

The gist of it is that, when the subject involved an idea, Rembrandt was not only justified in sacrificing the corporeal to the incorporeal, but was master of a technique that could express the idea conclusively and with supreme emotional appeal.

Crude as her sense of life's larger significance was, and meager as had been her experience in the things which count for most in the sum of a young girl's existence under fair circumstances, she grasped intuitively the gist of it all.

His eye took in six or seven lines at once, and his mind grasped the sense with a swiftness as remarkable as that of his eye; sometimes even one word in a sentence was enough to enable him to seize the gist of the matter.

This is really the gist of the whole matter; coca wine is largely consumed by people who fondly believe themselves to be total abstainers, and who are active enough in denouncing those who take a little wine, or a glass of beer at their meals.

Bodhidharma, the Zen master, propagated this doctrine in the south as well as in the north, the gist of which teaching consists in attaining the unattainable, which is to have right insight into the truth itself by forgetting word and thought.

A Postscript is a very useful invention: but it is not meant (as so many ladies suppose) to contain the real gist of the letter: it serves rather to throw into the shade any little matter we do not wish to make a fuss about.

Nor could you wonder had you witnessed a recent experience of mine when, in the armor of blissful and stupendous ignorance, I gaily narrated the gist of it to a Fellow of the Royal Geological Society on the occasion of my last trip to London.