Sentence Examples
"The agreement was permissive, not compulsory."
Is it merely permissive or is it mandatory?
In most states the acts are permissive.
May is simply permissive; can is potential.
The edict is purely permissive.
This seemed a permissive politeness which I could not feel to be an oppression.
She smiled at last, with permissive recognition, and Gates came forward.
One of the first is that most clauses are permissive rather than positive.
But as these laws were permissive and not prohibitory, the evil was not restrained.
He smiled once more, and at some permissive light in her face, he began even to laugh.
When I ask whether the courts would accept such a permissive outlook, Stallman cuts me off.
He spoke calmly upon the Permissive Liquor Bill, and gave the ministerial statement in regard to it.
It would be better to give them all charters of incorporation; but still he would make that permissive.
At the present time, most states have general permissive statutes, under which corporations may be organized.
It contained a permissive clause which allowed of the formation of companies to control the spirit-sale in towns.
It contains but five clauses touching the subject: four of these are prohibitory, and the other is simply permissive.
The dogs rapidly learned not to take the food on the sounding of notes of other pitch than the one taught them as the permissive signal.
It is likely, therefore, that the plan of district superintendence permissive under the laws of certain States will hardly secure wide acceptance.
The good intent of the policies of the administration are reflected in many permissive bills which went to the Legislature, in most cases to remain.
He wished to see free schools, but in this Act contented himself with securing permissive legislation, which he believed would soon lead to the adoption of a free system.
'Sleep on now, and take your rest, ' is not so much irony as 'spoken with a kind of permissive force, and in tones in which merciful reproach was blended with calm resignation. '
Mangan, meantime, waited, with a permissive smile, for the moment to make his "little girl" known to the young ladies from Mount Music, and to their cousin, young Larry Coppinger.
The acts are permissive in character and not compulsory, and can only be put in force by a vote of a majority of members in an urban district or city, or of a majority of voters in rural districts.
It is important to observe that the act of 1870 left the giving of 976 religious instruction, whether in voluntary schools (in which its inclusion might be assumed as of course) or in board schools, purely permissive.
Under the permissive library laws of thirty States, there had been formed up to 1896, when the last comprehensive statistics were gathered, about 1, 200 free public libraries, supported by taxation, in the United States.
In this view of the matter, conditions are not actively productive, but are passively permissive; they do not cause variation in any given direction, but they permit and favour a tendency in that direction which already exists.
This legislation still bears the permissive and elastic character which marked the more successful of the previous acts, but it provides ampler means to members of ascertaining and remedying defects of management and of restraining fraud.
To this there came both a series of exceptions to the classification and a series of directions as to the practical segregation in daily life, additional to or inconsistent with the classification; some of them permissive and others mandatory.