Two or three of the gentlemen sat near him, and I caught at times scraps of their conversation across the room. At first I could not make much sense of what I heard; for the discourse of Louisa Eshton and Mary Ingram, who sat nearer to me, confused the fragmentary sentences that reached me at intervals.
2007, Christine L. Marran, Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture (page 137)
Furthermore, it should be recalled from the previous chapter that criminological discourse of the 1930s deemed every woman a potential criminal, implicitly including the domestic woman.
2008, Jane Anna Gordon, Lewis Gordon, A Companion to African-American Studies (page 308)
But equally important to the emergence of uniquely African-American queer discourses is the refusal of African-American movements for liberation to address adequately issues of sexual orientation and gender identity.
puhekieltä Dealing; transaction.
Beaumont and Fletcher
Good Captain Bessus, tell us the discourse / Betwixt Tigranes and our king, and how / We got the victory.
c. 1599, (w), (w), Act III, Scene 2, http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=hamlet&Scope=entire&pleasewait=1&msg=pl
Hamlet. (..) Will you play upon this pipe? (..) It is as easy as lying. Govern these ventages with your fingers and thumbs, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music.
Music discoursed on that melodious instrument, a Jew's harp, keeps the elfin women away from the hunter, because the tongue of the instrument is of steel.
1915, (w), The Secret Play, New York: D. Appleton & Co., Chapter XXIII, p. 300 https://archive.org/details/secretplay00barbgoog
Dahl's Silver Cornet Band, augmented for the occasion to the grand total of fourteen pieces, discoursed sweet—well, discoursed music; let us not be too particular as to the quality of it.